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George Washington 
Prom the portrait by Stuart. 

" The basis of our political systems is the right of the people to make 
and to alter their constitutions of government.'" — From the Fare- 
well Address. 



THE STORY 



OF 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 

POLITICAL AND INDUSTRIAL 



BY 



WILLIS MASON WEST 

Sometime Professor of History in the University of Minne- 
sota ; Author of The American People, American 
History and Government, The War and 
the Neiv Age, Modem Progress 



ALLYN AND BACON 

BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO 

ATLANTA SAN FRANCISCO 






COPYRIGHT, 1922 
BY WILLIS MASON WEST 



KartDooti ^^rees 

J. S. Gushing Co. — Berwick & Smith Co, 

Norwood, Mas8., U.S^. 






' Who Cometh over the hills, 
Her garments with morning sweet, 
The dance of a thousand rills 
Making music before her feet ? 
Her presence freshens the air ; 
Sunshine steals light from her face ; 
The leaden footstep of Care 
Leaps to the tune of her pace. 
Fairness of all that is fair, 
Grace at the heart of all grace. 
Sweetener of hut and of hall, 
Bringer of life out of naught. 
Freedom, O fairest of all 
The daughters of Time and Thought ! " 



FOREWORD 

I TRY here to present in one volume a readable story of 
American history with particular reference to the constant 
struggle for democracy in society, politics, and industry. So 
compact a treatment ought not to be encumbered with bris- 
tling footnotes or bibliographies ; and so the general accu- 
racy of the treatment will have to be vouched for by the 
standing of my text-books in the same field, — The Ameri- 
can People and American History and Government. 

The older historians used to close their narratives at a 
date somewhat remote from that of their own labors, — 
" pulling up abruptly " (in the words of Mr. H. G. Wells) 
as they approached contemporary history " as though they 
had suddenly come upon something indelicate." While I 
have been toiling over the concluding chapters of this vol- 
ume, my respect for that judicious procedure has been un- 
expectedly enhanced. On so recent a period as the years 
since the World War the most impartial conclusions are at 
the mercy of fresh evidence daily to be expected. I can 
only trust that the reader will not disagree with my troubled 
decision that to attempt that difficult period in such a work 
as this was worth while, even at the possible cost of serious 
imperfections. 

Willis Mason West 

WiNDAGO Farm 

January 1, 1922 



CONTENTS 

PART I — THE ENGLISH IN AMERICA, TO 1660 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. What the English Found ........ 1 

Geographical influences ; the natives ; Spain in America ; France 
and her failure. 

II. Virginia and Maryland to 1660 14 

III. New England and the Pilgrims 47 

IV. Massachusetts Bay ......... 62 

V. Other New England Colonies ....... 98 

Rhode Island (religious freedom) ; Connecticut (political democ- 
racy) ; the New England Confederation. 



PART II — COLONIAL AMERICA (1660-1763) 

VI. The Struggle to Save Self-government (1660-1690) . . 107 

VII. "Colonial Americans" from 1690 to 1763 .... 133 

VIII. Colonial Life 145 



PART III — SEPARATION FROM ENGLAND (1763-1783) 

IX. The Causes 168 

How the French Wars prepared the way ; causes inherent in Ameri- 
can development ; relation of the struggle to English history ' the 
social uprising in America. 
X. Ten Years of Agitation, 1765-1774 189 

XI. The American Revolution 206 

From colonies to commonwealths; the new state constitutions; 
Congress and the war; the peace treaty. 



PART IV — THE MAKING OF THE SECOND "WEST" 

XII. The Southwest: Self-developed ...... 237 

XIII. The Northwest: A National Domain 249 



Vlll 



CONTENTS 



PART V — THE CONSTITUTION AND THE FEDERALISTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

XIV. The "League or Friendship" 260 

The "Critical Period," 1783-17S8; the evils, and their source 
in the Articles of Confederation. 

XV. The Federal Convention and the Constitution . . 272 

XVI. Federalist Organization 300 

Making the Constitution move; Hamilton's financial policy. 

XVII. Decline of the Federalists 316 

Rise of political parties; foreign relations, 1795-1800; 
domestic troubles, 1797-1800 f Alien and Sedition laws and 
Kentucky Resolutions) ; expiring Federalism. 

PART VI — JEFFERSONIAN REPUBLICANISM, 1800-1830 

XVIII. America in 1800 337 

XIX. The "Revolution of 1800" 353 

XX. Territorial Expansion ....... 370 

Louisiana Purchase ; \\ est Florida ; I^wis and Clark 
Expedition. 

XXL The War of 1812 380 

PART VII — A NEW AMERICANISM, 1815-1830 

XXII. A Third "West" 393 

Immigration ; new lands and the steamboat ; internal im- 
provements ; rapid growth. 

XXIIL Foreign Relations, 1815-1830 405 

XXIV. Nationalism and Reaction 411 

• Protective tariffs; extension of Federal jjovver by the courts; 

the Missouri Compromise; rise of new political parties. 



PART VIII — A NEW DEMOCRACY, 1830-1850 

XXV. The America of 1830 421 

The three sections (the West and optimistic democracy) ; the 
awakening of labor, 1825-1837; intellectual and social 
progress. 

XXVI. The "Revolution of 1828" 453 

XXVII. The "Reign" of Andrew Jackson, 1829-1841 . . .462 



CONTENTS 



IX 



CHAPTER 

XXVIII. 

XXIX. 
XXX. 

XXXI. 
XXXII. 



XXXIII. 
XXXIV. 

XXXV. 
XXXVI. 



XXXVII. 
XXXVIII. 

XXXIX. 

XL. 
XLI. 

XLII. 



XLIII. 



XLIV. 

XLV. 

XLVI. 



PART IX — SLAVERY 

PAGE 

Sl.\very to 1844 ' . . . .479 

Slavery and Expansion 490 

The Struggle to Control the New Territory • • . 496 

The Breakdown of Compromise 503 

On the Eve of the Final Struggle 516 

America in 1860 ; the political campaign of 1860. 

PART X — NATIONALISM VICTORIOUS, 1860-1876 

The Call to Arms 526 

The Civil War 534 

Campaigns ; finances ; slavery abolished : European relations. 

Reconstruction ......... 555 

The Close of an Era 567 

PART XI — A BUSINESS AGE, 1876-1914 

National Growth 578 

The Political Story, 187G-1896 591 

Civil service and the tariff. 
Another Phase of the Political Story .... 603 

Greenbacks and free silver. 
America a World Power 610 

The war with Spain and the aftermath. 
The People vs. Privilege 625 

Railroads (the Grangers); "big business"; public service 

corporations. 
Forward-Looking Movements ...... 646 

The labor movement ; the farmer movement; socialists and 

single taxers; the "progressive" movement in politics; 

Woodrow Wilson's first administration. 

PART XII — THE WORLD WAR 

How THE War Came ........ 684 

The heaped materials; the Balkan fuse; and the hand to 
light the fuse. 

America and the War 703 

The Peace Congress and the Proposed World League . 731 

The New Age 748 

Appendix : The Federal Constitution .... 1 

Index 15 



ILLUSTRATIONS AND MAPS 

1. George Washington ........ Frontispiece 

PAGE 

2. Lines of equal temperature in America and Europe ..... 2 

3. An Algonkin village (from Beverly's Virginia, 1701) .... 5 

4. Columbus at the court of Ferdinand and Isabella (Brozik) ... 8 

5. Champlain's fight with the Iroquois (from Champlain's Les Voyagen) . 10 

6. French posts and Indian portages. Colored .... facing 10 

7. Queen Elizabeth knighting Francis Drake (from Gilbert's drawing) 15 

8. Facsimile of the title page of Hakluyt's Voyages 18 

9. Virginia in 1606-1608 23 

10. Facsimile of the London Company's Proclamation of the Virginia Lottery, 

1615 25 

11. Captain John Smith (from Smith's Generall Hisforie) .... 28 

12. The two possible Virginias of 1609 (the "west and northwest" clause) . 29 

13. Facsimile of the first page of King James' C ounterhlaste to Tobacco . 35 

14. Facsimile of Baltimore's instructions to the first Maryland governor 

regarding Protestants .......... 45 

15. Virginia and New England in 1620 48 

16. Facsimile of the Mayflower Compact, as given in the Bradford manu- 

script 53 

17. Pilgrims going to meeting (Boughton) 56 

18. Governor Edward Winslow (from the portrait in Pilgrim Hall) . . 60 

19. "Marks" of Indian chieftains to a covenant with Massachusetts in 1644 

(Massachusetts State Archives) ........ 70 

20. The Cradock House at Medford 71 

21. Kettle (said to be first iron casting in America; Lynn Library) . . . 72 

22. Jo\mCotion(Drnke's History and Antiquifies of Boston) .... 79 

23. Colonial fireplace and utensils . . . . . . . .84 

24. Facsimile from the " Body of Liberties " ....... 85 

25. New England in 1640 99 

26. Old grist mill (1645) at New Londt)n, Connecticut 103 

27. English America, 1660-1690. Colored .... facing 107 

28. Pine Tree Shilling (Massachusetts Historical Society Collections) . .113 

29. Boston's summons to Andros (Mas.sachusetts Archives) . . .117 

30. William Penn at twenty-two (Lely) 129 

31. The Appalachian "Fall Line" 134 

32. A page from the earliest known edition of the New England Primer 154 

X 



ILLUSTRATIONS AND MAPS xi 

PAGE 

33. Apagefrom the Paisley edition of same ("evening prayer") . . . 155 

34. Advertisement for a runaway white "servant" (Boston News Letter, 

Sept. 18, 1755) 158 

35. The Baltic (American-built English schooner, 1765. Water color in 

Essex Institute) 160 

36. An American "deep-sea-going" ship 161 

37. Massachusetts paper money of 1690 162 

38. Mount Vernon (from a photograph) 164 

39. Lexington Green (from a photograph) 165 

40. Boone's Fort 166 

41. Colonial cartoon — reception of a bishop in New England . . . 177 

42. Handbill of New York Sons of Liberty — "We Dare" . . . .191 

43. Facsimile of Pennsylvania Journal's announcement of suspension due to 

Stamp Act 192 

44. Paul Revere's engraving of the landing of British regiments . . . 194 

45. The Concord Minute Man (French) 207 

46. The Concord Fight (Simmons in Boston State House) .... 208 

47. The Washington Elm at Cambridge (photo) ...... 209 

48. Facsimile of the first of Jefferson's draft of the Declaration of Inde- 

pendence ............ 216 

49. A continental bill (Massachusetts Historical Society) .... 227 

50. Boundaries proposed by France in 1782. Colored . . facing 233 

51. Crossed swords, American and English (Massachusetts Historical Society) 235 

52. The United States in 1783; nominal and actual territory. Colored /acinar 237 

53. Western settlement, 1769-1784 239 

54. A "Boone tree" ........... 242 

55. Daniel Boone at eighty-five (the Harding portrait) .... 243 

56. The United States in 1783. State claims and cessions. Colored facing 251 

57. Manasseh Cutler 256 

58. An old Ohio mill 257 

59. Frontier lines, 1774, 1790, and 1820. Colored . . . facing 258 

60. George Washington (Stuart) 275 

61. Benjamin Franklin (Duplessis) ........ 278 

62. "Eighth Federal pillar reared" (Boston Chronicle, June 12, 1788) . . 297 

63. John Adams (Stuart) 302 

64. Harvard in 1770 (Paul Revere's engraving) ...... 315 

65. Alexander Hamilton (Trumbull) ........ 335 

66. Physical map of the United States ........ 340 

67. California redwoods .......... 341 

68. Sectional elevation of the United States (after Draper) .... 342 

69. Movement of centers of population and of manufactures . . . 343 

70. .\n early cotton gin .......... 345 

71. Farm tools in 1800 346 

72. Modern plowing 347 

73. A colonial spinning wheel 352 



Xll 



ILLUSTRATIONS AND MAPS 



1819) 



forN 



74. A Conestoga wagon ...... 

75. Cincinnati in 1810 (after Howe) .... 

76. United States growth from 1800 to 1853. Colored 

77. "Louisiana" and "West Florida" (three maps, 1756- 

78. Meriwether Lewis in hunting costume . 

79. Explorations in Louisiana Territory. Colored 

80. Photographic reproduction of part of the Boston Centinel 

1814, showing secession tendencies . 

81. The National Road 

82. Distribution of population in 18''20. 

83. Thomas Jefferson (Stuart) ..... 

84. Chicago ("Fort Dearborn") in 1831; based on a 

drawing ........ 

85. Time card showing the long factory day in 1848 . 

86. Ralph Waldo Emerson (the Concord statue by French) 

87. The "DeWitt Clinton" locomotive 

88. Jefferson's home, Monticello ..... 

89. The birthplace of Abraham Lincoln . 

90. A Jackson cartoon — "Clar de Kitchen" . 

91. The presidential election of 1828 .... 

92. Test vote on the Compromise of 1850 . 

93. An antislavery handbill of 1851 . 

94. Test vote on the Kansas-Nebraska Bill . 

95. Railroad construction from 1830 to 1860. Colored 

96. Harvesting in 1831 ...... 

97. Harvesting to-day ....... 

98. Union and Confederacy in 1862 .... 

99. Scene of the Civil War ...... 

100. Union and Confederacy after Gettysburg 

101. Lincoln and McClellan at Antietam 

102. Lee and Jackson .... 

103. Abraham Lincoln (the French statue) 

104. Ulysses S. Grant in 1865 

105. Railroad land grants, 1850-1871 .... 

106. The Capitol at Washington ..... 

107. Rate of increase of population from 1910 to 1920 . 

108. Ellis Island 

109. Future Americans ....... 

110. The biggest electric locomotive .... 

111. Forging a railway car axle ..... 

112. A modern blast furnace (the Carrie Furnaces of the Carnegie 

pany) 

113. Shearing oflF steel slabs ..... 

114. The Panama Canal at the Miraflores Locks . 

115. Ladle pouring molten metal into pig-iron molds 



facing 



facing 
ovember 9, 



contemporary 



PAGE 

367 
368 
371 
376 
378 
379 



facing 



Steel 



facing 



Com- 



391 
396 
403 
408 

423 
441 
445 
451 
454 
455 
457 
463 
500 
504 
507 
516 
518 
519 
532 
536 
537 
538 
541 
554 
568 
570 
576 
579 
580 
581 
583 
584 

585 
587 
623 
638 



ILLUSTRATIONS AND MAPS 



Xlll 



116. Wilson and Gompers \v;itcliing a procession of tlic American Federation 

of Labor in 191G ........ 

117. The Minnesota Capitol 

118. The Arrow Rock Dam 

119. The United States Supreme Court in 19^20 .... 

l^O. Maps of the Balkans (the seed plot of war) in 1912 and 1913 . 
Vll. General John J. Pershing ....... 

VZi. "Mittel Europa" in 1918, showing also the frontier .states lost by Rus- 
sia after Brest-Litovsk ....... 

1'23. German lines in the west in July and November. 1918 

I '24. American airplanes ....... 



656 
664 
673 
681 
694 
721 

725 

727 
753 



THE STORY OF 

AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 

PAKT I -THE ENGLISH IN AMERICA 
CHAPTER I 

WHAT THE ENGLISH FOUND 

American freedom has its roots deep in the story of 
•England. In that island, comparatively free from peril of 
despotic conquest from abroad, was first wrought out for 
the world the beginning of constitutional liberty. 

" Lance and torch and tumult, steel and gray-goose wing, 
Wrenched it, inch and ell and all, slowly from the king." 

So, at a price, in the field, on the scaffold, in the dungeon, 
and in the harder martyrdoms of broken lives and ruined 
homes, did Englishmen through heroic centuries work out 
the union of a strong government and free institutions. 

The story of colonial America is the story of transplanting 
those institutions by Englishmen of the day of Elizabeth 
and Shakspere to our new continent for a still ^, ^ 

\ 1 The Eng- 

ireer growth. Many other peoples soon began to lish roots 
play each its indispensable part in making this of American 
composite nation. Even in the closing colonial 
period. Frenchman, Dutchman, German, gave us much 
of our blood and our thought ; and, later still, Norseman, 
Irishman, and finally Slav and Latin, besides their con- 
tributions in music and art, have made the sinew of our 

1 



2 



THE ENGLISH IN AMERICA 



national life. But the forces that have shaped that life — 
the institution-building forces — were supplied by the early 
English settlers. 

American history has no primitive period. The earliest 
colonists had command enough over nature not to be con- 
trolled by her to any such degree as were the 
cai in- early Greeks or Latins or the primitive English 

fluences: \^ their old liome. Nature has counted for less, 
and man for more, than in Old-World history. 
Moreover, our early history has- to do with the Appalachian 
coast only, and that fringe of the continent is more like the 




Lines of Equal Temperature in America and Europe. 

European homes of the early colonists than is any other 
large district in America. The lives of the English settlers 
were far less changed by removal thither than if they had 
colonized the Mississippi valley or the Pacific coast. 

But the Appalachian coast does differ from the European 
coast of the Atlantic in two matters that vitally influenced 
colonization. In the first place, the summers are 
hotter and the winters colder than in Europe. 
Unexpected fevers in one season, and unforeseen 
freezing in the other, ruined more than one 
attempt at settlement. Captain George Weymouth explored 



Climate 
of the Ap 
palachian 
district 



GEOGRAPHY AND SETTLEMENT 3 

the region near the mouth of the Kennebec In the spring 
of 1605, and l)rought back to England glowing reports 
of a bahiiy climate " like that of southern France " ; but 
the colonists who, trusting to this account, tried to settle 
there a little later, suffered cruelly from a winter like that 
of Norway. Theii, too, as one goes from north to south, the 
climate changes more suyiftly in America than in Europe. In 
their settlements, between Maine and Florida, English 
colonists encountered climates as different as they would 
have found in the Old World if they had spread out from 
Norway to Morocco — many times the variation they had 
known in the home island. 

Owing to differences in soil, as well as to this variation 
in climate, the natural products varied greatly from north to 
south. The rich lands of the south were suited to the culti- 
vation of tobacco or rice or cotton, in large tracts, by slaves 
or bond servants. The middle district could raise foodstuffs 
on a large scale. The north was less fertile : farm- 
ing was not profitable except in small holdings occupations 
with trustworthy " help " ; but the pine and oak ^'■°™ °°''t^ 
forests of that region, its harbors, and the fish in 
its seas, invited to lumbering, shipbuilding, commerce, and 
fishing. Each section had its distinct set of industries, 
and so came to have its peculiar habits of living. Virginia 
Englishman and New England Englishman grew apart in 
life and character. 

In our day these tendencies to sectionalism are vanquished 
by constant intercourse and by the amazing fluidity of our 
population. Of three brothers born in Minnesota forty 
years ago, one lives in New Orleans, one in San Francisco, 
the third in Boston ; and the three meet in occasional visits 
of business or friendship. But nothing of this was known 
to the colonial period. Communication from north difficulty 
to south was difficult. Colony was divided from of com- 
colony, or groups of colonies were divided from ™"'"'=*<^°° 
one another, by arms of the sea. Even when two colonies 
lay side by side without intervening bays, there were still 
no roads running from one to the other. The only highways 



4 THE ENGLISH IN AMERICA 

were the rivers, flowing from the mountains to the sea, and 
as a rule, a colony found it about as convenient to communi- 
cate with England as with its neighbor on either side. 

But geography did give the English colonists two advan- 
tages over their European rivals in America. Their terri- 
Engiish ad- ^^^2/ ^^'<^^ ^<^^^^ more accessible and more compact 
vantages: tha)i that held by France or Spain. We some- 
and accls- ^^^^^^ ^P^^^ ^f the vast inland valleys of the St. 
sibie terri- Lawrcncc and the Mississippi, where the French 
^°^^ cast their fortunes, as " gateways to the conti- 

nent " ; and so they are — to the interior. But in the early 
days men did not care to go far into the interior. They liked 
better the fringe of the continent, where they could keep 
touch with the old home. Moreover, in the age before 
steamships, vessels could hardly ascend the Mississippi 
above New Orleans, because of the swift current and count- 
less snags and bars, and much of the year the St. Lawrence 
was ice-locked ; but the strip of coast colonized by Eng- 
land, between the Appalachians and the sea, had countless 
little harbors easily open to the small sailing vessels of that 
day. On the other hand, when once small bands of French 
and Spaniards had won their way to the interior, they spread 
themselves out too fast — faster than their strength justified. 
But the rugged Appalachians, singularly impassable for such 
low mountains, covered as they were with forests tangled 
with underbrush and vines, kept the English colonists from 
scattering too hastily. It was easier for the English than 
for the others to get into America ; and, after they got there, 
it was not so easy for them to weaken themselves by dis- 
The native pcrsiug too widely. True, four rivers broke the 
"Indians" Appalachian wall — the Potomac, Delaware, Sus- 
quehanna, and Hudson-Mohawk; but, without more engi- 
neering skill than that age possessed, only the Mohawk could 
be used as a road to the inner country — and that route 
was closed by the formidable Iroquois. 

The distribution of the natives reinforced the geographical 
influence. We have little accurate knowledge about the num- 



THE NATIVES 5 

bers of the natives ; but it is certain that those east of the 
Mississippi did not exceed 200,000. Many a single city in 
that district to-day contains more people than dwelt in all 
the continent, north of Mexico, when Europeans first touched 
its shores. Three groups of Indian peoples held the country 
between the Mississippi and the Atlantic. The Gulf Tribes 
(Choctaws, Seminoles, Creeks) had made the most progress 
toward civilization ; but they were too far south and west 
to affect White settlement much until the beginnings of 



P:^J ,4;- 




An Algonkin Village. From Beverly's History of Virginia (1701) ; based on 
a picture by John White (one of Raleigh's colonists) in 1585, now in the British 
Museum. The palisades must have been twelve feet high. Probably a spring 
of water was found inside. The fields of corn and tobacco in the rear were 
common property. Ceremonial dances were held within the circle of posts 
about the "lodge" in the foreground. 



Georgia and Tennessee, almost at the end of the colonial 
period. The roaming Algonkins were the largest group, 
but also the weakest and least civilized. Numbering from 
75,000 to 100,000 souls, — thinly scattered in petty, mu- 
tually hostile tribes^ — they " haunted rather than in- 
habited a vast hunting preserve " stretching from the 
Atlantic to the INIississippi and from the Ohio to the far 
north. They included the Powhatans, Delawares, Narra- 
gansetts, Pequods, Mohegans, and indeed nearly all the 
tribes with which the early English settlers came in con- 



6 WHAT THE ENGLISH FOUND 

tact. The third group, the Iroquois Confederacy, was the 
strongest native power for war. They numbered about 
10,000, and lived in compact, fortified villages in what is now 
western New York. 

In South and Central America the Spaniards had to deal 
only with races gentler than any of these North American 
And their Indians. So the Spaniards overran the continent 
influence on faster than they could occupy it. Their rule, too, 
colonization ^^^ built upon the slavery of the natives, and 
the conquerors mixed their blood with this enslaved popu- 
lation until their own nationality was lost. In the north, 
the French came into conflict with the formidable Iroquois, 
and deadly blows from this fierce confederacy did much to 
prevent French mastery in America. The English, in their 
time of weakness, touched only the Algonkins, who could 
not seriously imperil their settlement. At the same time 
the Algonkins were untameahle, and so the English did not 
mix blood with them. And they were dangerous enough, 
to scattered settlements to help keep the English colonies 
fairly compact. This compact settlement gave opportunity 
for truer civilization and for more division of labor and 
consequent industrial progress, and made it easier for the 
colonies to unite against England when the time came. 
The natives, like nature, seeming unkind to the English 
settler, were really kinder to him than to his rivals. 

In various ways, too, the Indians aided English coloniza- 
tion directly. They furnished the first settlements with 
,. Indian ^^^^ " Indian corn " that warded off starvation ; 
corn " and and soon they taught the settlers to plant both 
to acco corn (maize) and tobacco — the two native prod- 
ucts of supreme value in the early period. Maize was long 
the main food supply. European grains failed in the new 
climate season after season, while the colonist was learning 
the new conditions. Moreover, to clear and prepare the 
soil for wheat or barley took much time. Maize was a surer 
crop and needed less toil. The colonist learned from the 
Indian to raise it, at need, without even clearing the forest, 



SPAIN IN AMERICA 7 

— merely girdling the trees to kill the foliage, and planting 
among the standing trunks. It was no accident that this 
Indian grain came to be called " corn," the general name 
for European grains. Tobacco the colonist exchanged for 
European goods. If Indian corn enabled him to live through 
the first hard years, it was tobacco that first made him rich. 
Nor do these gifts tell the whole story of the European 
settlers' debt to the natives. Colonies too far north to 
raise tobacco found their first wealth in furs, 
obtained mainly from native hunters. Indian tributions 
wampum at times made an important part of ^^°^ *^^ 
colonial money. Forest trails, worn into deep 
paths by the feet of generations of Redmen, became high- 
ways for White travel. The New York Central Railroad 
follows the old Iroquois trail from Lake Erie to the Hud- 
son ; and in Minneapolis one of the finest streets (Hennepin 
Avenue) is an ancient Indian trail from the neighboring 
Lake Harriet to the Mississippi just above the Falls of St. 
Anthony. Water routes, too, discovered by native pilots 
in birch canoes, were adopted by White traders. And sta- 
tions for the exchange of furs, where certain trails and 
waterways joined, became the sites of mighty cities like 
Milwaukee, Chicago, St. Louis, Detroit, and Duluth. 

Spain was first in the field in American colonization. 
During the crusades, Europe had learned to depend on 
Asiatic spices, sugars, cottons, silks, and metal- Spain in 
wares, as luxuries and even as daily necessities. America 
For two hundred years a vast caravan trade had brought 
these articles, in a steady stream, from central Asia to the 
eastern shores of the Mediterranean ; but in the fifteenth 
century the rise of Turkish barbarians in Asia Minor closed 
this route. Europe, just then awaking from the long torpor 
of the Middle Ages, and astir with new impulses, eagerly 
sought new trade routes into Asia. Portugal found one, to 
the south, around Africa. Columbus, aided by the Spanish 
Isabella, tried a still bolder western road — and stumbled on 
America in his path. 



8 



ENGLAND'S RIVALS 



This discovery marked the close of the fifteenth century. 
The next century in the New World was Spain's. The story 
of her conquests is a tale of heroic endeavor, marred by re- 
volting ferocity. The details, as an old Spanish chronicler 
said, are " all horrid transactions, nothing pleasant in any 
of them." Not till twenty years after the discovery did 
the Spaniards advance to the mainland for settlement ; 
but, once begun, her handful s of adventurers swooped 
swiftly north and south. By 1550, she held not only all 




Columbus at the Court of Fekuinand and Isabella. From the painting by 
Brozik in the Metropolitan Museum in New York City. 



South America (save Portugal's Brazil), but also all Central 
America, Mexico, the Californias far up the Pacific coast, 
and the Floridas. The gold from Mexico and Peru helped 
to give Spain her proud place as the most powerful country 
in Europe through most of the sixteenth century ; and she 
guarded her American possessions jealously. The Gulf of 
Mexico and the Caribbean were Spanish lakes, and the 
whole Pacific was a " closed sea." Frenchman or English- 
man, caught upon those waters, was given a grave beneath 
them. 



FRANCE IN AMERICA 9 

Nor was Spain content with even this huge empire on 
land and sea. She phmned grandly to occupy the Mississippi 
valley and the Appalachian slope in America, and Spain's 
to seize Holland and England in Europe. But, in ^^^^ 
1588, she received a fatal check when the gallant English 
" sea dogs " destroyed her " Invincible Armada " in that 
wonderful nine-days sea fight. That victory did more than 
merely save England : it marked a turning point in World 
history. Spain never recovered her old supremacy upon 
the sea, and so other European people? were left free to try 
their fortunes in America. 

For a time France seemed most likely to succeed Spain 
as mistress of North America. A quarter of a century 
went to exploration and failures. Then, in 1608, France in 
Champlain founded a French colony at Quebec, America 
Soon, canoe fleets of traders and missionaries were coasting 
the shores of the Great Lakes and establishing French sta- 
tions there at points still known by French names. Finally, 
in 1682, after years of splendid effort. La Salle succeeded in 
following the Mississippi to the Gulf, setting up a French 
claim to the entire valley. In later years New France con- 
sisted of the colony on the St. Lawrence, in the far north, 
and the semi-tropical colony of New Orleans, joined to each 
other, along the interior waterways, by a slight chain of 
trading posts and military stations — Detroit, Sault Ste. 
Marie, Vincennes, Kaskaskia, St. Louis, and the like. 

From the beginning of this colonization, it was plain that 
France and England tvere the real rivals for the control of 
eastern North America. The open struggle 
between them began in 1689, and lasted some England the 
seventy years in a series of wars, until France "vais for 

A.iii6nc& 

was thrust out of the continent in 1763. 

It is easy to point out certain French advantages. At 
home French statesmen worked steadily to build a French 
empire in America, while the English government French ad- 
ignored English colonies. The thought of such an vantages 
empire, too, inspired French explorers in the wilderness, — 



10 



ENGLAND'S RIVALS 



splendid patriots like Champlain, Ribault, and La Salle. 
France also sent forth the most zealous of missionaries, 
like the heroic Marquette, to convert the savages. These 
two mighty motives, patriotism and missionary zeal, played 
a greater part in founding New France than in establishing 
either Spanish or English colonies. Moreover, the French 
could deal with the natives better than the less sympathetic 
English could, and their leaders were men of far-reaching 
views. 



A^^^^i 




Sf^^'^ 









^j:>\f 



i'*^ 'f^^' 




^i. •'•■' 







Champlain's Fight with the Iroquois, on the shores of Lake Champlain. From 
Les Voyages du Sieur de Champlain (Paris, 1613), the volume in which this 
lake is first given Champlain's name. 

Why, then, did France fail ? 

The chief external cause was the relentless hatred of the 
Iroquois. Curiously enough, it was the ability of the French 
to make friends with the natives, which brought 
upon them this terrible scourge. Champlain came 
first in touch with Algonkin tribes, and won their 
friendship. He accompanied these allies on the warpath 
against the Iroquois, — and so made the Iroquois foes to New 
France. (1) The Iroquois annihilated the Huron Indians, 
whom French missionaries, after many heroic martyrdoms, 
had christianized, and upon whom the French had hoped to 



The Iroquois 
and the 
French 



WHY FRANCE FAILED 11 

build a native civilization. (2) At times they struck terrible 
blows at New France itself. (3) They shielded the English col- 
onies, during their weakness, from French attack. The French 
in Canada could strike at the English only by way of the 
route followed later by Burgoyne. Everywhere else the 
wilderness between Canada and the English settlements 
was impassable except by prowling bands ; and this one 
route was guarded by the Iroquois. (4) They changed the 
whole course of French exploration, turning it to the north. 

The home of the confederacy in western New York was 
" the military key to the eastern half of the continent," as 
Winfield Scott called it, and Ulysses S. Grant afterward. 
It commanded the headwaters of the Delaware, Susque- 
hanna, and Mohawk-Hudson system, and the portage at 
Niagara from Erie to Ontario, as well as part of the head- 
waters of the Ohio. The French leaders had keen eyes for 
military geography and would certainly have seized this 
position at any cost, if they had been able to learn its char- 
acter. They would then have fortified the Ohio by a chain 
of posts, as they did their other waterways ; and this would 
have buttressed their position on the Mississippi and the 
Lakes so as to defy attack. 

But the French did not suspect the importance of the 
Ohio valley until too late. Montreal was founded in 1611 ; 
but, instead of reaching the interior from there French 
by the upper St. Lawrence and Lake Erie, French colonization 

ill 1 i-. -1 diverted 

traders turned up the Ottawa, so as to avoid from the 
the Iroquois, and reached Lake Huron by port- owo valley 
age from Nipissing. Lake Erie was the last, instead of the 
first, of the Lakes to be explored. It was practically unused 
until after 1700, and the country to the south remained 
unknown even longer. Navigation was by fleets of canoes, 
which had to land frequently. Thus, because of the Iro- 
quois, the French could not follow the southern shore, or 
use the portage at Niagara. When they awakened to the 
value of the Ohio valley, English traders had begun to push 
into it, with cheaper goods ; and the opportunity for France 
was already lost. England's industrial superiority over 



12 ENGLAND'S RIVALS 

France, let us note in passing, was one factor in winning 
America. After 1725 that superiority was marked. 

Inherent weaknesses in French colonization, however, 
were the fundamental cause of French failure. 

1. New France icas not a country of homes or of agricul- 
ture. Except for a few leaders and the missionaries, the 
Inherent scttlcrs Were either unprogressive peasants or 
causes of rcckless adventurers. For the most part they 
fa^ure ^^^ ^^^ bring families, and they remained un- 
lack of married or chose Indian wives. Agriculture was 

omes |.j^^ only basis for a permanent colony ; but 

these colonists did not take to any regular labor. Instead, 
they turned to trapping and the fur trade, and tended to 
adopt Indian habits. The French government in Europe 
sought in vain to remedy this by sending over cargoes of 
" king's girls," and by offering bonuses for early marriages 
and large families. But even with this fostering, French 
colonization did not produce numbers. In 1754, when the 
final struggle for the American continent began, France 
had three times as many people as England had, but in 
America she had onlj^ a twentieth as many colonists. 

2. Paternalism smothered private enterprise. In all in- 
dustries. New France was taught to depend upon the aid 
Paternalism and direction of a government three thousand 
in industry niiles away. Aid was constantly asked from the 
king. " Send us money to build storehouses," ran the beg- 
ging letters of Canadian officials ; " Send us a teacher to 
make sailors " ; " We want a surgeon " ; and so, at various 
times, requests for brickmakers, ironworkers, pilots, and 
other skilled workers. Such requests were usually granted ; 
but New France did not learn to walk alone. The rulers 
did much ; but the people did little. 

3. Political life was lacking. In the seventeenth century 
France itself was a centralized despotism ; and in New 
Lack of France (to use the phrase of Tocqueville) " this 
political life deformity was seen magnified as through a micro- 
scope." No public meetings were permitted without a special 
license ; and such meetings, when held, could do nothing 



WHY FRANCE FAILED 13 

worth while. x\ll sorts of matters, even the regulation of 
inns and of pew rent, the order in which people should sit 
in church, the keeping of dogs and of cattle, the pay of 
chimney sweeps, were settled by ordinances of the governors 
at Quebec, who were sent over by the French king. " It 
is of the greatest importance," wrote one official, " that the 
people should not be at liberty to speak their minds." 

And the people had no minds to speak. In 1672, 
Frontenac, the greatest governor of New France, tried to 
introduce the elements of self-government. He provided 
a system of " estates " to advise with him, — a gathering 
of clergy, nobles, and commons (citizens and merchants) ; 
and he ordered that Quebec should have a sort of town 
meeting twice a year to elect aldermen and to discuss public 
business. But the home government sternly disapproved 
all this, directing Frontenac to remember that it was " proper 
that each should speak for himself, and no one for the whole." 
The plan fell to pieces : the people cared so little for it that 
they made no effort to save it. When such a plan was intro- 
duced in Virginia (which also during its first years had 
lacked such privileges) we shall see that no mere paper de- 
cree could take it away. 

The easiest way for France to have corrected the evils 
in her colonization would have been to let the Huguenots 
come to America. They were the most skillful Exclusion 
artisans and agriculturists in France and they of the 
had shown some knack for self-government, "g"®'^^ ^ 
Moreover, they were anxious to come, and to bring their 
families. But the government, which lavished money in 
sending out undesirable emigrants, refused to allow these 
heretics to establish a state in America. After all, in large 
part, it was religious bigotry that cost France her chance for 
empire. 



CHAPTER II 

VIRGINIA AND MARYLAND, TO 1660 

I. THE MOTIVES OF EARLY ENGLISH COLONIZATION 

Virginia was founded by a great liberal movement aiming at the spread 
of English freedom and of English empire. — Henry Adams. 

It is to the self-government of England, and to no lesser cause, that we 
are to look for the secret of that boundless vitalitij which has given to men 
of English speech the uttermost parts of the earth as an inheritance. 

— -John Fiske. 

The first impulse to English colonization came from Eng- 
lish patriotism. When Elizabeth's reign was half com- 
pleted, little England entered upon a daring 
colonization rivalry with the overshadowing might of Spain, 
and English Q^^ Qf \\^gX rivalry, English America was born. 
Reckless and picturesque freebooters, like Drake 
and Hawkins, sought profit and honor for themselves, and 
injury to the foe, by raiding rich provinces of Spanish 
America. More far-sighted statesmen, like Raleigh, saw 
that English colonies in America would be " a great bridle 
to the Indies of the Kinge of Spaine," and began to try 
so to " put a byt in the anchent enymys mouth." Wrote 
Richard Hakluyt {Western Planting, 1584 a.d.) : " If you 
touch him [Spain] in the Indies, you touch him in the apple 
of his eye. For, take away his treasure — which he has 
almost wholly out of his West Indies — his olde bandes of 
souldiers will soon be dissolved, his pride abated, and his 
tyranie utterly suppressed." 

But to found a colony in those days was harder than 
we can well comprehend. The mere outlay of money was 
enormous for that time. Ships had little storage room ; so 

14 



MOTIVES OF THE ENGLISH PROMOTERS 15 

freights were high, and the best accommodations were 
poorer than modern steerage. To carry a man from Eng- 
land to America cost from £10 to £12, or about The dif- 
$300 in our values (since money in 1600 was worth ficuities 
five times as much as now). To provide his outfit and to 
support him until he could raise a crop, cost as much more. 




Queen Elizabeth Knighting Drake, on board the Golden Hind on his return 
from raiding Spanish America in his voyage around the globe (1581). From 
a contemporary drawing by Sir John Gilbert. 

Thus to establish a family in America took some thousands 
of dollars. 

Moreover, there were no ships ready for the business, 
and no supplies. The directors of the early colonizing 
movements met all sorts of costly delays and vexations. 
They had to buy ships, or build them ; and, in Channing's 
apt phrase, they had to buy food for the voyages "on the 
hoof or in the shock," and clothing " on the sheep's back." 
They had also to provide government, medicines, fortifica- 
tions, military supplies, and food to meet a possible crop 



16 EARLY ENGLISH COLONIZATION 

failure. Much money, too, was sure to be lost in experi- 
menting with unfit industries under untried conditions — 
as in the futile attempts to produce silk and make glass in 
Virginia. 

The English crown founded no colonies, nor did it give 
money toward founding any. It did give charters to those 
PoUcy of men who were willing to risk their fortunes in the 
the crown attempt. These charters were grants of territory 
and of authority over future settlers. Thus the English 
colonies (with a few accidental exceptions, which will be 
noticed) were at first proprietary. The proprietor might 
be an individual or an English corporation. In either case, 
the proprietor owned the land and ruled the settlers. 

The first colonial charter was granted by Elizabeth, in 
1578, to Sir Humphrey Gilbert. Gilbert made tw^o brave 
Gilbert's attempts at a colony. The second, in the spring 
charter, of 1583, entered St. John's Harbor on the New- 
^^^^ foundland coast. Gilbert's claims were recog- 

nized readily by the captains of the " thirty-six ships of 
all nations" present there for the fisheries; but desertion 
and disaster weakened the colonists, and in August the 
survivors sailed for England. Gilbert had sunk his fortune, 
and he himself perished on the return voyage. Song and 
story dwell fondly on the Christian knight's last words, 
shouted cheerily through the storm-wrack from his sinking 
little ship to comfort friends on the larger consort, — " The 
way to heaven is as near by sea as by land." 

Gilbert's enterprise was taken up at once by his half 
brother, Sir Walter Raleigh, the most gallant figure of that 
Raleigh's daring age. In 1584 Raleigh received a charter 
attempts copied froni Gilbert's, and in the next three years 
he sent three expeditions to Roanoke Island on the Caro- 
lina coast, each time in considerable fleets. His first ex- 
plorers declared the new land " the most plentiful, sweet, 
fruitful, and wholesome of all the world," and the natives 
were affirmed to be " such as live after the manner of the 
golden age." But supplies and reinforcements were delayed 
by the struggle with the Spanish Armada ; and when the 



MOTIVES OF THE ENGLISH PROMOTERS 17 

next supply ships did arrive, the colonists had vanished 
without trace. 

Raleigh had spent a vast fortune (a million dollars in our 
values) ; and, though he sent ships from time to time to 
search for the lost colonists, he could make no further at- 
tempt at settlement. Still, despite their failures, Gilbert 
and Raleigh are the fathers of American colonization. The 
tremendous and unforeseen difficulties of the enterprise 
overmatched even the indomitable will of these Elizabethan 
heroes ; but their efforts had aroused their countrymen and 
made success certain in the near future. With pathetic 
courage, when in prison and near his death, Raleigh wrote, 
" I shall yet see it [America] an English nation." 

For twenty-five years, attempts at colonization had failed, 
largely because the life-and-death struggle with Spain in 
Europe drained England's energies. Worse was james i 
to come. James I (1603) sought Spanish friend- ^^'^ ^p^^^ 
ship ; and then indeed Englishmen began to feel their chance 
for empire slipping through their fingers. But splendid 
memories of the great Elizabethan days still stirred men's 
hearts; and, as a protest against James' dastard policy in 
Europe, the fever for colonization awoke again in the heart 
of the nation. Men said a terrible mistake had been made 
when Henry VII refused to adopt the enterprise of Colum- 
bus ; and they insisted vehemently that England ^j^^ London 
should not now abandon Virginia — ^"this one Company, 
enterprise left unto these days." Raleigh had 
found part of his money by forming a partnership with some 
London merchants. In 1606 some of these same merchants 
organized a large stock company to build a colony, and 
secured from King James a grant known as the Charter of 
1606, or the First Virginia Charter. 

The members of this Company hoped for commercial 
gain. No doubt some of its members cared only for this. 
But the great leaders cared more, like Raleigh and Gilbert, 
to build up the power of England, and some of them had 
it much at heart to Christianize the savages. This mis- 



18 



EARLY ENGLISH COLONIZATION 



Motives of 
the pro- 
moters in 
England 



THE PRINCIPALL 

NAVIGATIONS,VOIA- 

G E S A N D D I S C () V E R 1 1: S O F T H E . 
EngliOi r[ation,mac]e hy Sea or ouer Cand, 

to the moSl remote ,n:.l /.« .•/■oT Jisljtt Quarters of 

thccjrthi: I'lyiiiiic V ;:h:n rhccompaflc 



sionary purpose faded soon for actual colonists, but it long 
continued powerful in England. The great clergymen who 
guided the Church of England (then recently 
cut off from Rome) could not rest content with 
"this little English paddock" while Rome was 
winning new continents to herself by her de- 
voted missionaries ; nor could these good churchmen help 

squirming under the 
taunt of the Romanists 
"shcwinge that fhey are 
the true Catholicke 
churche because they 
have bene the onelie 
converters of many 
millions of infidells." 
"Yea," confesses the 
chagrined Hakluyt, "I 
myself have bene de- 
maunded of them how 
many infidells have bene 
by u s converted . " Such 
Englishmen cared for 
the London Company 
mainly in its aspect as 
a foreign missionary so- 
ciety — the first in the 
Protestant world ; and 
this missionary charac- 
ter brought the Com- 
pany much moral sup- 
port and many gifts of 
money from outsiders. 

Title Page of Hakluyt's Voyages. Richard -p vpars: pvpn thi«5 

Hakluyt was a clergyman of the English ^^^ :y CarS, CVCU iniS 

church whom Raleigh had interested deeply great Company had tO 

JruotrottTe^4''" """"'""' ^^^ '"" struggle with discour- 

agement and distress. 
But its pamphlets, urging people to buy stock, did not 
place emphasis on any hope of large dividends — as we 



Tlic firft,contcIning thcpcifonall traucU of the EngliHi vnto iHJUijSyrii^A- 
j-j/u,thc riucr Euphr-ues, BAbyiou, Bilfu^j, the Perfl.m GulfCj Onmz^ Chau!, 
CcM,Jf^iA,n\\d many Illatids adiayningto the South pait^ oi^^f/Ij .- toge- 
ther with the like vnto £^l>f, the chicfcft pores and places oiAjncs with- 
in and without the Strcighc oidhr-iltjr, and about die fiUBOUs Protnon- 
torie o\ BuofUJ £fptr.irf\a. 

The fecojid, comprehending thcu'onliy difcouerics of the EngJiTh towards 
the North and Norchcalt by Sci.:L*.oiL^lv2<i, Scnljiniii^ Csrelu, the Baic 
oi'S.Nuholti,thc Klcs vl'Co!^otrHt\ ratg.Uf, and 2(etij. ZojiLU coward the 
gtca; riuer ob,\?\i\\ the mightic Empire oiRttJJia, the Ci{}i.m Sc2^Georg;a, 
K^rmcnK.-^nfidij,?crjU,Boghar in BxcirU^ic diuerskingdoms aiTsri^U, 

The third and laft.including the EngliHi vzliant attempts in fcarchtng al- 
moftali the corners of the vaftc and ncn- world of c^/wr.v*, from 75.dc- 
grccs ofNortherly latitude Southwatd^nJ.i/c/j iKcot^s.KrwpmdUnd, 
the matncofrw^/«M, the point of f/or/ii,the Baic ^fc^&xK-o, all the Ir\- 
hndo(7^MjHi/pjms,&icco3AQ(Ttrraffrm.t,^£ri^U, the riuerofp/j/fjio 
the Strcightof lJWW/w: and through it^and from it in the South Sea to 
Chili, Peru, x.tltfco, tricGulicofC4/(/(sr»;i. AVjm .'<^» vp<m the backfidc 
olCajjAd:!, furtlier then cucr any Chriftian hitherto hith pierced, 
U 'hertunta is Added th iiB mosi renoxemed Engls^ Ut^aigxtioa, 

xwinj abjui dw ivlmlc Olobc o/dic LaoU. 




fmfrintcd at London hy G e o k o e B i .r h o p 
and Ralph Newb e ri k, Deputies to 

Cltf. I'iTOVMEK BrtREEH, Pfiiitcr to the 



MOTIVES OF THE COLONISTS 19 

expect a prospectus of a commercial company to do — but 
rather on the meanness and "avarice*' of the man who 
would "save" his money instead of using it to extend Eng- 
lish freedom and the kingdom of God. It was these high 
enthusiasms, far more than it was greed, that, a few 
years later, brought hundreds of the noblest of Englishmen 
to the rescue of the enterprise. 

So far we have looked only at the motives of Motives of 
Englishmen who stayed at home and there helped the coio- 
to promote American colonization. Now for the yeomen^^ 
motives of the colonists. 

In 1600 England needed room. True, the island had 
still only a tenth as many people as to-day ; but, as industry 
was carried on in that day, its four millions were more 
crowded than its forty millions are now. For the small farm- 
ers especially, life had become very hard, and these yeo- 
men furnished most of the manual labor in the early colonies. 
Few of this class could pay the cost of transporting them- 
selves and their families to America ; and so commonly 
they were glad to bind themselves by written "indentures" 
to become "servants" to some wealthy proprietor. That 
is, these indentured servants mortgaged their labor for four 
years, or seven years, in return for transportation and 
subsistence, and perhaps for a tract of wild land at the end 
of their term of service. 

Captains and capitalists came from the English gentry 
class. Until the peace with Spain in 1604, many high- 
spirited youths had been fighting Spain in the 
Netherlands, for Dutch independence ; and others ■ younger 
had made the "gentlemen-adventurers" who, sons "and 
under leaders like Drake, had paralyzed the far- 
flung domains of New Spain with fear. To these men, and 
to many "younger sons" of gentry families for whom there 
was now no career at home, America beckoned alluringly as 
the land of opportunity and adventure. The period, too, 
was one of rapid rise in the cost of living ; and the heads of 
some good families found themselves unable to keep pace 



20 EARLY ENGLISH COLONIZATION 

with old associates. Some of these preferred leadership in 
the New World to taking in sail at home. 

None of these "gentlemen" were used to steady work, and 
they were restive under discipline ; so sometimes they drew 
down abuse from strict commanders like the worthy Captain 
John Smith. But they were of that "restless, pushing 
material of which the world's best pathfinders have ever 
been made"; and when they had learned the needs of 
frontier life, their pluck and endurance made them splendid 
colonists. 

It must be remembered also that among the settlers there 
were always a few rare men animated wholly by patriotic 
devotion or by religious zeal or by a lofty spirit 
of adventure. Even the first Jamestown expedi- 
tion (not a fair sample, either) included, among its 104 souls, 
Bartholomew Gosnold, a knightly survivor of the spacious 
Elizabethan days ; and doughty John Smith, a robust hero, 
" even though his imagination did sometimes transcend the 
narrow limits of fact" ; and the gentle and lovable church- 
man, Robert Hunt ; to say nothing of worthies such as Percy 
and Newport. The modern community which, for each 
twenty souls, can show one built on a mold like these is not 
unhappy. The next three years, too, saw in Virginia many 
another gallant gentleman, like Thomas Gates, John Rolfe, 
and Francis West. 

At a later period, we shall see, Puritanism and desire for 
religious freedom became added motives for English colo- 
nization. But for the early settlers the chief load- 
Expectations , , -111 J 1 1 
of wealth stoue, uo doubt, was some wild dream oi wealth — 

exaggerated g^eh as is pictured in Marston's Eastward Hoe 

And 

Marston's (1605 ; the name a survival of the idea that 
" Eastward Columbus had found the East). At a tavern 

Hoe! . , r-< ^^ 11 • • • 

meetmg the mate. Sea (jull, is enticing some young 
blades to embark for a proposed Virginia voyage : — 

Sea Gull. Come boyes, Virginia longs till we share the rest 
of her . . . 

Scape Thrift. But is there such treasure there, Captaine . . . ? 
Sea Gull. I tell thee, golde is more plentiful) there then copper 



MOTIVES OF THE COLONISTS 21 

is with us ; and for as much reclde copper as I can bring. He have 
thrise the waight in gold. Why, man, all their dripping pans 
. . . are pure gould ; and all the chaines with which they chaine 
up their streets are massie gold ; all the prisoners they take are 
fettered in gold; and for rubies and diamonds they goe forth on 
holydayes and gather 'em by the seashore to hang on their childrens 
coates, and sticke in their childrens caps, as commonly as our 
children wear saffron-gilt brooches. . . . Besides, there wee 
shall have no more law than consceince, and not too much of 
eyther. 

This gross caricature called forth violent denunciation 
from good clergymen, like Crashaw, who retorted from the 
pulpit that Virginia had tlu-ee enemies, — ^"the Divell, the 
Papists, and the Players." ^ But it remains true that in 
the first colonies the expectations of sudden riches were 
more extravagant than in later attempts, and led for a time 
to disastrous neglect of the right sort of work. Still the mo- 
tive was a proper one. It calls for no sneer. It was the same 
desire to better one's condition, which, in a later century, lured 
the descendants of the first settlers to people the continent 
from the Appalachians to the Golden Gate. Moreover, 
the motive was not mere greed. The youth was moved 
by a vision of romance and adventure. He was drawn 
partly by the glitter of gold, but quite as much by the 
mystery of new lands bosomed in the beauty of unknown 
seas. Best of all, these motives of gain and of Romance 
noble adventure were infused with a high patriot- and 
ism. Englishmen knew that in building their own p^*"°**^™ 
fortunes on that distant frontier, just as truly as wdien they 
had trod the deck of Drake's ship, they were widening the 
power of the little home island, which they rightly believed 
to be the world's best hope. Marston's extravagant sar- 
casm was nobly answered by Michael Drayton's Ode, ad- 
dressed to the 104 adventurers just setting sail, to found 
Jamestown the next spring : — 

^ A passage in Crashaw's "Daily Prayer for Virginia" ran, ^ — "Let Papists 
and Players and such other scum and dregs of the earth, — let them mocke such 
as helpe to build the walls of Jerusalem!" 



22 EARLY VIRGINIA 

You brave heroique minds, 

Worthy your countries name. 

That honour still pursue, 

Goe, and subdue. 

Whilst loyt'ring hinds 

Lurk here at home with shame. 

***** 

And cheerefully at sea, 

Suecesse you still intice. 

To get the pearle and gold. 

And ovr.s to hold, 

Virginia, 

Earth's only Paradise. 

***** 

And in regions farre. 

Such heroes bring yee forth 

As those from whom yee came ; 

And plant our name 

Under that starre 

Not knowne unto our north ! 

II. VIRGINIA A PROPRIETARY COLONY, 1607-1624 

When James I granted the charter of 1606 (p. 17) to 
the enterprising merchants who wished to undertake 
The Charter founding colouies in America, the stockholders 
of 1606 were divided into two subcompanies : the London 

Company, made up mainly of Londoners ; and the Plymouth 
Company, made up of gentlemen from. the west of England. 

The name Virginia then applied to the whole region 
claimed by England on the Atlantic coast, between the 
Territorial Spaniards on the south and the French on the 
grants north. This made a tract about 800 miles long, 

reaching from the 34th to the 45th parallel. Within this 
territory, each Company was to have a district 100 miles 
along the coast and 100 miles inland. The exact location 
of these grants was to be fixed by the position of the first 
settlements. The Londoners were to choose anywhere be- 
tween the .S4th and the 41st parallel (or between Cape Fear 



THE LIBERTIES OF ENGLISHMEN 



23 



and the Hudson) . The western merchants were to place their 
settlement anywhere between the 38th and the 45th parallel 
(between the Potomac and Maine) . Neither Company was 
to plant a colony within a hundred miles of one established 
by the other. This arrangement left the middle district, from 
the Potomac to the Hudson, open to whichever Company 
should first occupy it. Probably the King's intention was 




to encourage rivalry ; but, naturally, the dubious overlap- 
ping region was avoided by both parties. There was room 
for six of the 100-mile locations outside of it. 

The two proprietary Companies were expected to remain 
in England. To the settlers themselves the charter gave 
no share in their own government ; but it did 
promise them "the liberties, franchises, and im- 
munities" of Englishmen. This much misunder- 
stood clause (found also in Gilbert's and in nearly 
all later charters) did not mean "the right to vote" or 



The 

" liberties 
of English- 
men " 



24 EARLY VIRGINIA 

to hold office : not all Englishmen had such privileges at 
home. It meant such rights as jury trial, habeas corpus 
privileges, and free speech, — so far as those rights were 
then understood in England. 

The plan of government was clumsy. In England there 

was to be a Council for the double company, with general 

oversight. In each colony there was to be a lower 

Unsatis- . . . 

factory plan Council appointed by that higher Council. These 
for govern- local Couucils Were to govern the settlers accord- 
ing to laws to be drawn up by the King. Thus 
the government was partly royal and partly proprietary, 
without a clear division between the authorities in England ; 
while in the colonies there was no single governor, but only 
unwieldy committees. The "Instructions" drawn up by 
James before the first expedition sailed kept loyally to the 
spirit of the charter. They provided that death or mutila- 
tion could be inflicted upon no offender until after conviction 
by a jury, and for only a small number of crimes, for that 
day, though the appointed Council were to punish minor 
offenses, such as idling and drunkenness, at their discretion, 
by whipping or imprisonment (authority much like that 
possessed then by the appointed justices of an English 
county) . 

Under this crude grant was founded the first permanent 
English colony. In 1607 the Plymouth Company made a 
fruitless attempt at settlement on the coast of 
Maine (p. 3), and then remained inactive for 
twelve years. But in December of 1606 the London Com- 
pany sent out, in three small vessels, a more successful expedi- 
tion to "southern Virginia." The 104 colonists reached the 
Chesapeake in the spring of 1607, and planted Jamestown on 
the banks of a pleasant river flowing into the south side of 
the Bay. They chose this site some thirty miles up the 
stream to avoid Spanish attack from the sea. For some 
years this was the only regular settlement. 

Jamestoivn urns a great '' plantation y The company of 
stockholders in England were proprietors. They directed 



THE PLANTATION" AT JAMESTOWN 



25 



the enterprise, selected settlers, appointed officers, furnished 
transportation and supplies and capital — much like a lumber 
company in New York or Minneapolis that sends a " pianta- 
its woodsmen into our Northern woods. The col- tion colony " 
onists were employees and servants. They did the work, — 
cleared forests, built rude forts and towns, and raised crops, 
— facing disease, famine, and savage warfare. The manag- 
ing Council at Jamestown were not so much political rulers 



ADcclararion forthe certaine time of drawing the great ftandlng Lottery. 




: 16 dppartnt co iIk ttoiiu. bv tjsBi B V VcK 

lum'fc.'mrrpubfifanoiistticnuuu i 

fflr&OqcDUCtllstOllJUf&MUHlffmC^'""'"."'}'^^^^^'''" 

i^?->i W>" *Stcatflaniling iwimtlwiobc v r ',i in',.'i;i _ 

S%3 Vr^ f01fH!i6CI.W;lWlIthl,Cltfal]uig(m,16 't)„>. Ita^ 

!wrs:?Ky'<^ our iflufs OtfircO. ono othns frpc i; r..t„m.i^.fu.-.vii3v^mgi 
atB, iijhaff nionrrift art atTToftpAt) ^ .»iiii.i«un,fiuHiv«i,rfi 

umnittBiIjtttmiiirrtioualiigMDtDirtfoJctaauoi.; -"'■■iKi**' 

bmg jIljnmnantiDmQfrEiniQrutBoiisio rctoluriijf * j'p 

l)OubtsofaiinDiffcrciuuunfiiointbarfpfti.upomta t , o.fwr„Mor 



R tmam nsclitf uoimns tniflimiiigo o: tijuuartiif be 

Sl>Uafftolca:if irrnurlnsp.'iusijnD Hcnwr&s btf 
^ C(ww^-ElIlK1'mo.•co:Itl^rth^Uo^frTWlua^'aUm( out.h:f 
. cw.iu^ ifliauhaurabuiof ^oiKiuurrtD r-^ui^^. foulifiiKr 
i ci™.,o''E'i''nl«s''>f >«'«!' JlhalimfrtcoftlianConiVii"' 1 

sluufhispanmaanOa unoil)np:(iiiIslirrtafict 
cimma f mliajincwt artoioiuirio li» jtninuurc of ilWluc 

S|»im05 trn ilwiuioso.'tvpUiaiBS. 

§ wWocuaisbclmHttUniliUiciJaruirmofaiii'riiia 
o cit.»f«i KSfnionrr.prjrtuffOIificiofoifreiv aPufQnjrciiio\ ■■- 



Proclamation OF A Virginia Lottery, February 22, 1615, to raise funds for the 
Company's use. The original belongs to the Society of Antiquaries of London. 
The two sides of the Seal of Virginia are shown in the squares. 



as industrial overseer.'^. Their task was a kind of house- 
keeping on a large scale. 

The products of the settlers' labor went into a common 
stock. Lumber, sassafras, dyestuffs, were shipped to the 
Company to help meet expenses. Grain was kept industry in 
in colonial storehouses, to be guarded and dis- common 
tributed by a public oflScial. Here, too, were kept the sup- 
plies from England, — medicines, clothing, furniture, tools, 
arms and ammunition, seeds, stock cf all kinds for breeding, 
and such articles of food as meal, bread, butter, cheese, salt, 
meat, and preserved fruits. For many years the existence 



26 EARLY VIRGINIA 

of the colony depended on the prompt arrival, every few 
months, of a "supply"; and the colonists measured time 
by dating from "the First Supply," or "the Third Supply." 

The system of "industry in common" has frequently 
been called an experiment in communism. In reality it was 
no more communism than was a Virginia slave plantation 
in 1850. The London Company would have been the last 
men to approve any theory of communism. The common 
industry and undivided profits were simply clumsy features 
of management by a distant proprietary company. 

The opening days of the colony promised an endless 
summer idyl to the inexperienced adventurers. "That 
Early ex- vcry Honorable Gentleman, Master George 
pectations Percy," as John Smith afterward calls him, has 
left us a record of his first impressions : — 

. . . The six and twentieth day of Aprill about foure a clocke 
in the morning, wee descried the Land of Virginia : the same day 
wee enterd into the Bay of Chesupioe without any let or hinder- 
ance ; there wee landed and discovered a little way, but we could 
find nothing worth the speaking of but faire meddowes and goodly 
tall Trees, with such Fresh-waters runninge through the woods as 
I was almost ravished at the first sight thereof. . . . 

The [28th] day . . . we went further into the Bay, and saw 
a plaine [level] plot of ground where we went on Land . . . we 
saw nothing there but a Cannow, which was made out of the whole 
tree, which was five and fortie foot long, by the Rule. Upon this 
plot of ground we got good store of Mussels and Oysters, which 
lay upon the ground as thicke as stones : wee opened some and 
found in many of them Pearles [!]... We passed through 
excellent ground full of Flowers of divers kinds and colours, and 
as goodly trees as I have seene, as cedar, cipresse, and other kindes. 
Going a little farther, we came into a little plot full of fine and 
beautiful! strawberries, foure times bigger and better than ours in 
England. 

But the location of Jamestown was low and unhealthful ; 
the committee government was not suited to vigorous 
action ; and only the stern school of experience could teach 



DISAPPOINTMENT AND SUFFERING 27 

men in that day how to colonize an unknown continent. 
The early years were a time of cruel suffering. The first 
summer saiv two thirds of the settlers perish, while yg^j.g ^^ 
much of the time the rest were helpless with cruel 
fever. The closing pages of Captain Percy's ^"^®"°s 
Discourse tell the story : — 

Our men were destroyed by cruel 1 diseases . . . and by warres 
[with the Indians] ; and some departed suddenly, but for the 
most part they died of meere famine. There were never English- 
men left in a forreigne Country in such miserie as wee were. . . 
Our feed was but a small can of Barlie, sod in Water, to five men 
a day ; our drinke, cold Water taken out of the River, which was 
at flood verie Salt, at a low tide full of slime and filth . . . Thus 
we lived for the space of five months in this miserable distresse, 
not having five able men to man our Bulwarkes . . . our men 
night and day groaning in every corner of the Fort most pittiful to 
heare . . . some departing out of the World, many times three 
or four in a night, in the morning their bodies trailed out of their 
Cabines, like Dogges, to be hurried. 

The First Supply, in the fall of 1607, found only 38 survivors, 
and for 20 years each new immigration lost, on an average, 
half its members the first season. 

From one peril the colony was saved by its very misery. 
Spain watched jealously this intrusion into a region which 
she claimed as her own, and the government con- The Spanish 
templated an attack upon Jamestown. In partic- p®"' 
ular, the Spanish ambassador at London urged his king re- 
peatedly to have "those insolent people in Virginia annihi- 
lated." "It will be serving God," he wrote, "to drive these 
villains out and hang them." But the Spanish spies in the 
colony reported that it must fall of itself ; and the dilatory 
Spanish government, already slipping into decay and un- 
willing needlessly to make King James an enemy, failed 
to act. 

The most interesting figure during the first three years was 
the burly, bustling, bragging, eflBcient Captain John captain 
Smith. Smith finally became President of the in- John Smith 
effective Council. Then he quickly usurped all the power 



EARLY VIRGINIA 



The colony 
saved by 
Delaware's 
arrival, 1610 



of government, and bis ]>eneficent tyranny saved the colony 
from ruin. In 1609, however, he was injured by an explosion 
of gunpowder, and went back to England. The next winter 
was '''The Starving Time.'' A special effort had been made, 
the summer before, to reinforce the colony ; and in the fall 
the number of settlers had risen to more than three hundred. 
Spring found only sixty gaunt survivors. These had em- 
barked to abandon the colony, with slight chance 
of life whet her 
they went or 
stayed, when 
they met Lord Dela- 
ware, the new governor, 
with a fleet bringing re- 
inforcements and sup- 
plies. Had Delaware 
been later by three days, 
Jamestown would have 
been another failure, to 
count with Raleigh's at 
Roanoke. 

Meantime, the year 
1609 had seen a reinark- 

The charters ^blc OUtburst 

of 1609 and of eutliusiasm 
in England in 
behalf of the sinking 
colony. Sermons and 
pamphlets appealed to 
the patriotism of the 
nation not to let this 
new England perish. 

The list of the Company's stockholders was greatly multi- 
plied, and came to include the most famous names in 
England, along with good men from all classes of society ; ^ 
and this enlarged London Company received enlarged powers 

* Cf. p. 19. Each of the G50 subscribers bought from one to ten shares of stock, 
at £12 10 s. a share, or about $400 a share in our values. 




Captain John Smith. From the woodcut by 
Smith in the corner of his map of New Eng- 
hind in his Generall Historic. Smith's rhym- 
ing inscription below the picture refers to his 
"deeds more fair" than his face. 



THE TIME OF SLAVERY 



29 



THE T«0 POSSIBLE 

VIRGINIAS 

OF 1009 



through tiDo new charters in 1609 and 1612. Three things 
were accomphshed by these grants : — 

1. The territory of the Company was extended. It was 
made to reach along the coast each way 200 miles from Point 
Comfort, and "up into the land throughout from sea to sea, 
ivest and northwest.'" 

2. The authority before kept by the king was now turned 
over to the Company ; and that body received a democratic 

organization. It was to elect 
its own "Treasurer" and 
Council (President and Direc- 
tors, in modern phrase), and 
to rule the colony in all re- 
spects. 

3. A more efficient govern- 
ment was provided in the 
colony. There was no hint 
yet of 5e(f-government. The 
Company in England made 
all laws and appointed all 
officers for the colony. But 
the inefficient plural head in 
the colony, with its divisions 
and jealousies, was replaced 
by one "principal governor" 
with a Council to assist him. 

Virginia had left anarchy 
behind, hut she had not reached 
liberty. The Com- The rule 
pany continued the 
"plantation " plan ; 
and from 1611 to 
1616 its chief officer in Virginia was Sir Thomas Dale. This 
stern soldier put in force a military government, with a 
savage set of laws known as Dale's Code. Among other pro- 
visions, these laws compelled attendance at divine worship 
daily, under penalty of six months in the galleys, and on 
Sundays on pain of death for repeated absence. Death was 




This map shows two possible interpre- 
tations of this clumsy "northwest" 
phrase. The Virginians themselves 
had no trouble in deciding which to 
insist upon. Probably the words 
"west and northwest" were used 
vaguely, with the meaning ' ' toward 
the western ocean," which was sup- 
posed to lie rather to the northwest. 



of Dale : 

" the time of 

slavery," 

1611-1616 



30 EARLY VIRGINIA 

the penalty also for repeated blasphemy, for "speaking evil 
of any known article of the Christian faith," for refusing to 
answer the catechism of a clergyman, and for neglecting 
work. The military courts, too, made use of ingeniously 
atrocious punishments, such as burning at the stake, break- 
ing on the wheel, or leaving bound to a tree to starve, with 
a bodkin thrust through the tongue. These years of 
tyranny were long remembered as "^/«e time of slavery,'''' 
with a government "very bloody and severe ... in no 
wise agreeable to a free people or to the British consti- 
tution." Dale, however, was conscientious and efficient, 
and full of enthusiasm for Virginia. " Take the best four 
kingdoms of Europe," he wrote home, "and put them 
all together, and they may no way compare with this 
country for commodity and goodness of soil." Moreover, 
he kept order and protected the colony from the Indians, and 
in 1614 he made 81 three-acre allotments of land to private 
holders — a small garden to each free settler. At his de- 
parture, in 1616, the colonists numbered 351. Of these, 65 
were women or children, and some 200 were "servants." 

A revolution 7J07V took place in the London Company. 
That body had split into factions. The part so far in control 
Sandys in was Conservative, and belonged to the "court 
England party" in English politics; but toward the close 
of 1618, control passed to a liberal and Puritan faction, led 
by the Earl of Southampton and Sir Edwin Sandys. Since 
these patriots were struggling gallantly in parliament against 
y^jjjj TCing James' arbitrary rule, it was not unnatural 

Yeardiey in that they should at oucc grant a large measure of 
irgima self-government to the Englishmen across the 
Atlantic, over whom they themselves ruled. Sir George 
Yeardiey was sent out as governor, and a new era began in 
Virginia. 

With Yeardley's arrival, in April, 1619, the number of 
colonists was raised to about a thousand. They were still, 
mainly, indentured servants (p. 19), and were distributed 
among eleven petty "plantations," — mere patches on the 
wilderness, — scattered along a narrow ribbon of territory, 



THE FIRST REPRESENTATIVE ASSEMBLY 31 

nowhere more than six miles wide, curving up the James for 
a hundred miles. Industry was still in common, except for 
the slight beginning of private tillage under Dale ; and 
martial law was still the prevailing government. 

According to his instructions Yeardley at once introduced 
three great reforms. 

1. He established private ownership, giving liberal grants 
of land to all free immigrants. A large part of the settlers 
continued for some time to be "servants" of the private 
Company, and these were employed as before on ownership 
the Company's land. But each of the old free planters 
now received 100 acres; each servant was given the same 
amount when his term of service expired ; and each new 
planter thereafter was to receive 50 acres for himself and as 
much more for each servant he brought with him. Grants 
of many hundred acres were made, too, to men who rendered 
valuable service to the colony. For many years, all grants 
were in strips fronting on rivers up which ships could ascend. 

2. Dale's code of martial law was set aside. Yeardley 
proclaimed, said a body of settlers later, "that those cruell 
lawes by which we had soe longe been governed . 

, -^ 111 1 A return to 

were abrogated, and that we were now to be gov- the promises 
erned by those free lawes which his Majesties sub- °^ *^® 
jects live under in Englande." This was merely 
to keep the pledge of the charters. 

3. The settlers received a share in the government. A 
Representative Assembly was summoned, "freely to be 
elected by the inhabitants, ... to make and Rgpresenta- 
ordaine whatsoever lawes and orders should by tive govern- 
them be thought good and profitable." This ^^^ 
political privilege was a new thing. 

The First Representative Assembly in America met at 
Jamestown, August 9 (New Style), 1619. It was not purely 
representative. Each of the eleven plantations ^j^^ ^g_ 
sent two delegates; but in the same '"House'''' sembiy of 
with these elected "Burgesses" sat the governor 
and his Council (seven or eight in number), appointed 



3^ EARLY VIRGINIA 

from England. We have no account of the elections. 
No doubt they were extremely informal. Of the thousand 
people in the colony, seven hundred must have been 
"servants" without a vote; and, of the three hundred 
free persons, a fraction were women and children. Probably 
there were not more than two hundred voters. These 
were distributed among eleven plantations, in some of which 
the only voters must have been the foreman and employees 
of a rich proprietor. 

The Assembly opened with prayer, and slipped with amaz- 
ing ease into the forms of an English parliament. It "veri- 
fied credentials" of the delegates, and it gave all bills "three 
readings." Laws which to-day would be stigmatized as 
"Blue Laws" were passed against drunkenness, gambling, 
idleness, absence from church, "excess in apparel," and other 
misdemeanors. For that age, the penalties were light. The 
Church of England was made the established church; and 
aid was asked from the Company toward setting up a college. 
With all this business, the Assembly sat only six days. 

This beginning of representative government in the 
wilderness has a simple grandeur and a striking signifi- 
And its cance. Virginia had been transformed from a 

significance "plantation colouy," ruled by a despotic over- 
seer, into a self-governing political community. The pioneers 
manifested an instinct and fitness for representative gov- 
ernment, a zest for it, and a deep sense of its value. It 
came as a gift; but, once given, it could not he ^vithdrawn} 
Jury trial and representative government were both estab- 
lished upon a lasting foundation in America in 1619, while 
Virginia urns the only English colony. These two bulwarks 

1 Many American writers speak as though the colonists had created the Assembly. 
Thomas Hutchinson (History of Massachusetts Bay, 94, note) said that in 1619 
representative government "broke out" in ^'irginia; and Story, in his great 
Commenturies on the Constitution (I, § 166), said that the Assembly was 
"forced upon the proprietors" by the colonists. Influenced by such earlier au- 
thorities, .John Fiske {Old Virginia, I, 180) explains the Assembly on the ground 
that "the people called for self-government." But this view is contrary to all 
evidence. For a good statement, see Channing, United States, I, 204. For the 
ardor, however, with which tlie settlers maintained the privilege, in contrast to 
French indifference, see pp. 37-39 below. 



PATERNALISM 33 

of freedom were not tlien known in any large country 
except in England ; and they were not to take root in 
the colonies of any other country for more than two hun- 
dred years. Their establishment in Virginia made them 
inevitable in all other English colonies. 

A charter to the settlers established still more firmly the 
grant of self-government. Yeardley put before the Assembly 
a long document from the Company. The 
Assembly called it a "Great Charter," and ex- terofieis" 
amined it carefully, "because [it] is to binde us *° ^^^ 
and our heyers forever." This '"charter of 1618'' 
has been lost, but the Assembly's Records show that it 
guaranteed a representative Assembly. It was wholly 
different from royal grants to proprietors in England : 
it was the first of many charters and "concessions" issued 
by the proprietors of various colonies to settlers in America, 
in order to set up ideals of government or to attract settlers. 
From this time it became customary for colonial proprietors, 
when circulating handbills in England advertising the 
features of their American possessions, to \siy stress upon 
the guarantee of political privileges. 

The new management of the Company bestirred itself 
to build up the colony on the material side also. To 
supply the labor so much needed, Sandys (the 
"Treasurer," or President) sought throughout care by the 
England for skilled artisans and husbandmen, and Company in 
shipped to Virginia many hundred "servants." 
Several cargoes of young women, too, were induced to go 
out for wives to the settlers, and supplies of all kinds 
were poured into the colony with a lavish hand. 

This generous paternalism was often unwise. Effort and 
money were wasted in trying to produce glass, silk, and wine, 
— so that England might no longer have to buy such com- 
modities from foreigners — while the main industry that was 
to prove successful, tobacco raising, had to win its way 
against the Company's frowns. Moreover, pestilence and 
hardship continued to kill off a terrible proportion of the 



34 EARLY VIRGINIA 

people. In the first three years after Yeardley's arrival, 
more than three thousand new settlers landed ; but in 
March, 1622, of the population old and new, only some 
twelve hundred survived, and that spring an Indian massacre 
swept away a third of that little band. 

In spite of all this, Virginia became prosperous under the 
Company''s rule. Two years after the massacre, the popula- 
tion had risen again to twelve hundred, and the number of 
settlements had become nineteen. The Indians had been 
crushed. Fortunes were being made in tobacco, 
makes the and the homcs of the colonists were taking on 
colony self- g^jj ^jj. Qf comfort. The period of experiment 
was past, and the era of rapid growth had just 
been reached. During the following ten years (1624-1634) 
the population grew fourfold, to more than five thousand 
people, organized in eight counties. 

Tobacco for export was first grown in 1614, on the planta- 
tion of John Rolfe, who had married the Indian girl Poca- 
hontas. The Company always discouraged its cultivation 
— on moral as well as business grounds. Smoking was 
looked upon much as indulgence in . liquor is now. King 
James wrote a tract against the practice, and even later 
King Charles warned the Virginians not to "build on 
smoke." Tobacco, however, found a steady sale in Europe 
at high prices; and before 1624 Virginians knew they had 
found a paying industry. Thereafter the colony needed 
no coddling. 

Meanwhile King James became bitterly hostile to the liberal 
management of the Company. Sandys was particularly 
King James obnoxious. He was prominent in parliament in 
and Sandys opposing the King's arbitrary policy, and was 
reported to be "the king's greatest enemye." More than 
once he had been committed to custody by royal order. An 
envious business associate testified that "there was not any 
man in the world that carried a more malitious hearte to the 
government of a Monarchic than Sir Edwin Sandys did," 
and that Sandys had said repeatedly that he "aymed . . . 
to make a free popular state there [in Virginia] in which the 



KING JAMES ATTACKS THE LIBERAL COMPANY 35 



people should have noe government putt upon them but 
by their owne consents." 

When Sandys' term expired, in 1620, King James sent 
to the "General Court" of the Company the names of four 
men from whom he ordered them to elect a new 
Treasurer. The Company (some hundreds of tempts to 
the best gentlemen of England present) remon- control the 
strated firmly against this interference with the 
freedom of election guaranteed by their charter; and 




A COVNTERBLASTE 

TO TOBACCO. 



Hat the manifold abufes of this vile cu- 
llome ot To^dcco taking , may thcbetterbc 
efpiedjitisfit, that fiiit you enter into con- 
fidcrauon both of the firll: originall chcrcof^ 
andlikcwifc ofthe reafons gf the Hrll; entry 
thereof into this Countrey. Forccrtaincly 
as fuch cullomes, that haue their firltiniti- 
tution either from a godly, neceflaryjor ho- 
nourable ground , and are firlt brought in, 
by the meanes of fbme worthy , vcrcuous, 

and great Perronage,areeuer,andmolliull:ly,holdenin great and rcucrent 
' cftimatioii and account, by all wife, vertuous, and temperate fpirits : So 

Ihouldit by thkontrary, iuftlybringagrcardifgrace into that fort ofcu- 




Beginning of King James' Tract : a facsimile from his Complete Works, London, 

1616. 

James yielded, exclaiming petulantly, "Choose the Devil, 
an ye will; only not Sir Edwin Sandys!" Sandys then 
withdrew his name ; and the Company sent a committee 
to his friend, the Earl of Southampton,^ the liberal leader 

^ This was Shakspere's Southampton, of course. 



36 EARLY VIRGINIA 

in the House of Lords, to inquire whether he would 
accept the office. Southampton was Httle more to the 
royal taste. "I know the King- will be angry," said he to 
his friends, "but, so this pious and . . . glorious work be 
encouraged, let the Company do with me as they think 
good." Then, "surceasing the ballot," the meeting elected 
him "with much joy and applause, by erection of hands." 
Sandys was chosen Deputy Treasurer and remained the 
real manager. 

When Southampton's second term expired (162*2), James 
again sent to the Court of Election five names. It would be 
pleasing to him, he said, if the Company would choose a 
new Treasurer from the list ; but this time he carefully 
disclaimed any wish to infringe their "liberty of free elec- 
tion." The Company reelected Southampton by 1 17 ballots, 
to a total of 20 for the King's nominees. Then they sent a 
committee to thank James "with great reverence" for his 
"gracious remembrance" and for his "regard for their 
liberty of election!" It is reported that the King "flung 
away in a furious passion." Small wonder that he listened 
to the sly slur of the Spanish ambassador, who called the 
London Company's General Court "the seminary for a 
seditious parliament." 

Since James could not secure control of the Company, he 
decided to overthrow it. A revival of the old factions within 
The King's ^^' ^^^^ ^^® Indian massacre of 1622 in Virginia, 
courts furnished a pretext. James sent commissioners 

the London ^^ ^^^^ colouy, to gather further information un- 
Company favorable to the Company's rule ; but the Vir- 
m 1624 ginians supported the Company ardently and 

made petition after petition to the King in its favor. 
The Company made a strong defense, and the charter 
could be revoked only by a legal judgment. Royal in- 
terference with the courts was a new thing in England 
and was never to recur after Stuart times. But Sir 
Edward Coke, the great chief justice, had just been dis- 
missed from office by James for refusing to consult the King's 
will in judicial decisions, aiid for a time the English courts 



BECOMES A ROYAL PROVINCE, 1624 37 

were basely subservient to the monarch. Accordingly, 
in 16^4, in a flimsy case against the London Company, the 
King's lawyers secured judgment that the charter was void. 

III. THE ASSEMBLY SAVED: 1624-1660 

Virginia had become a Royal Province. To the a Royal 
people this meant three things. Province 

1. Land titles from the Company to settlers held good. 
But all the territory still owned by the Company at its fall 
became crown land again. Thereafter, royal governors 
made grants from it to settlers much as the Company had 
done. Virginia afterwards frequently claimed its "ancient 
bounds" as described in the charter of 1609. That grant, 
however, was made to the Company in England, and not 
to the colony. The King was undoubtedly within his rights 
when he soon gave part of the old grant to Lord Baltimore 
for the colony of Maryland. 

2. The colony now had to support itself. In fifteen years 
the London Company had spent five million dollars upon 
it — without return to the stockholders ; and most Virgin- 
ians believed that without such fostering the enterprise would 
sink. In the next four years the settlers sent four petitions 
to the King for aid. One of them runs, in part: "The 
ground work of all is that there must bee a sufficient publique 
stock to goe through with soe greate a worke ; which we can 
not compute to bee lesse than £20,000 a yeare. . . . For 
by it must be mainetayned the Governor and his Counsell 
and other officers heere, the forest wonne and stocked with 
cattle, fortifications raysed, an army mainetayned, dis- 
coveries mayde by sea and land, and all other things req- 
uisite in soe mainefold a business." But the King was 
quarreling with parliament about money enough to run 
the government at home, and he paid no attention to such 
prayers. This was fortunate. The colony found that it 
could walk alone. 

3. Political control over the colonists was noiv in the King's 
hands. And, as the colonists feared that the King would help 



38 VIRGINIA A ROYAL PROVINCE 

too little, so, with more reason, they feared that he would 
govern too much. Even in Old England, with all its centuries 
The danger ^^ traditions for representative government, and de- 
of royal spitc dogged and heroic opposition from parliament 

absolutism g^fj^^j. parliament, this new Stuart monarch seemed 
almost to have made into fact his new French "Divine- 
Right" theories of kingship. How then could this little hand- 
ful of Englishmen in a strange land, dependent in many ways 
(as they thought) on the King's favor, hope to maintain their 
political liberty, now that they had lost the protection of 
their charter ! (The overthrow of the royal charters to the 
London Company made of no effect the Company's Charter 
of 1618 to the Virginians.) 

Even so, the Virginians were determined to save their 
Representative Assembly. As soon as it became plain that 
The struggle the Company was to be overthrown, in the spring 
to save of 16'24, a body of leading settlers sent to the King 

tfve govern- ail address in which they "humbly entreat ... 
™«°t that the Governors [to be appointed by the king] 

may not have absolute authority, . . . [and] above all . . . 
that we may retayne the Libertie of our General Assemblie, 
than which nothing can more conduce to our satisfaction 
or the public utilitie." At the same time the Assembly 
itself solemnly put on record its claim to control taxation, 
The law of "^ ^ memorable enactment: ''That the Governor 
1624 " No shall lay no taxes or ympositions upon the colony, 
wUhout^ ^^* lands or goods, other way than by the authority of 
representa- the General Assembly, to be levied and ymployed 
^^°^ as the said Assembly shall appoynt."" This was the 

first assertion on this continent of the ancient English 
principle, "No taxation without representation." 

That same summer, however. King James began his 
control by reappointing the old governor and Council in 
Virginia and giving them full authority to rule the colony. 
The instructions to these officers made no mention of an 
Assembly. Indeed James planned a permanently despotic 
government; but he died in a few months before he had 
completed his draft of a "new constitution" for Virginia. 



THE FIGHT TO SAVE THE ASSEMBLY 39 

The next year the new king, Charles I, appointed a new 
governor in Virginia with instructions Hke those used the 
year before by his father, and still with no reference to an 
Assembly ; and no Assembly met for five years (1624-1628). 

Still the colonists kept asking for one; and in 1625 they 
sent Yeardley to England to present their desires. Yeardley 
told the royal council that only the grant of an Assembly 
could allay the universal distrust in Virginia, where "the 
people, . . . justly fearing to fall into former miseries, 
resolve rather to seek the farthest parts of the World." 

Neither this threat nor other petitions met with any 
direct answer. In 1628 Charles did order the governor 
to call an Assembly, though only because he hoped, vainly, 
to persuade it to grant him a monopoly of the profitable 
tobacco trade. Then Charles appointed Sir John Harvey 
governor. Harvey belonged to the coiu-t faction in Eng- 
land ; but he had been one of the royal commissioners to 
Virginia in 1623, and apparently he had learned there that 
it would not be wise to try to rule the colony without an 
Assembly. His commission from Charles made no mention 
of one ; but, in 1629, before leaving England, he drew up for 
the King's consideration a list of seven "Propositions touch- 
ing Virginia," and one of these asked for a represent- The Vir- 
ative Assembly as part of the government. The King g»i"ans win 
seems to have been influenced by this request from the 
courtier-governor more than by the petitions of the colony. 
He was just entering upon his eleven-year period of "No 
Parliament" in England, but, in his answer to Harvey, he 
approved an Assembly for Virginia. 

With this sanction, the Assembly continued regularly ; and 
formal directions to call Assemblies became a part of each 
future governor's instructions. The change from a pro- 
prietary colony to a royal colony, then, did not make political 
liberty less. The Stuart kings were so involved in quarrels 
at home that they had little time to give to a distant colony ; 
and Virginia was left to develop with less interference than 
it would have had from the most liberal proprietary com- 
pany. The London Company had planted constitutional 



40 VIRGINIA UNDER THE COMMONWEALTH 

liberty in America; the settlers clung to it devotedly; and the 
careless royal government found it easier to use the institution 
than to uproot it. 

The Virginians had dreaded Harvey's coming. Despite 
his "proposition" for an Assembly, he was known as a 
supporter of arbitrary rule. And so, soon after 
Harvey "and his arrival, the Assembly of 1632 re'enacted, ivord 
'[ the mu- jQf iDord^ the great law of 1624- regarding representa- 
tion and taxation. Harvey clashed continually 
with the settlers, and complained bitterly to the authorities 
in England about the "selfwilled government" in Virginia, 
Finally, he tried to arrest some of his Council for "treason." 
Instead, the Council and Assembly "thrust him out of his 
government," sent him prisoner to England, and chose a 
new governor in his place. This was tJ!C mutiny of 1635. 

Two years later, the King restored Harvey for a time ; 
but replaced him, in 1639, by the liberal Wyatt. Then, in 
Sir William l^^l' Sir William Berkeley was sent over as gov- 
Berkeiey's emor. He had been an ardent royalist in England ; 
^J!tL„^. so his first Assemblv enacted verbatim, for the 

governor- <■' _ ' 

ship, 1641- third time, the law of 16'24 regarding taxa- 
^^*^ tion. Berkeley ruled, however, with much moder- 

ation, keeping in touch with the Assembly and showing 
no promise of the tyranny which was to mark his second 
governorship, after the Restoration. 

In 1649, after the English Civil War, the home country 
for a time became a republican "Commonwealth." Parlia- 
Virginia mcut scut Commissioners to America to secure 
under the \\^q obedience of the colonies. Berkeley wished 
wealth, to resist these officers, but the Assembly quietly 

1649-1660 gg^ }jij^j aside and made terms. With the ap- 
proval of the Commissioners, the government was reorgan- 
ized so as to put more power into the hands of the Burgesses, 
because parliament could trust them better than it could 
the more aristocratic elements. Each year a House of 
Burgesses was to be chosen as formerly, but this body was 
now to elect the governor and Council. 



EARLY MARYLAND 41 

During the next nine years {1652-1660), Virginia was 
almost an independent and democratic state. On one occasion 
(1657), a dispute arose between the Burgesses and ^ninde- 
the governor. Governor Matthews and the pendent 
Council then declared the Assembly dissolved d«°^°"a<^y 
(as a royal governor would have done). The Burgesses 
held that the governor, having been made hij them, could not 
unmake them, and that "we are not dissoluable by any 
power yet extant in Virginia but our owne." Matthews 
threatened to refer the matter to England. The Burgesses 
then deposed him, and proceeded to reelect him upon condition 
that he acknowledge their supreme authority. 

In March, 1660, Governor Matthews died. Charles II 
had just returned to the throne in England. The Assembly 
wished to conciliate Charles, and so it chose Berkeley 
governor again. But it also made an attempt to save 
Commonwealth liberties by enacting that Berkeley "governe 
according to the ancient laws of England and the established 
lawes of this country, and . . . that once in two years at 
least he call a Grand Assembly, and that he do not dissolve 
this Assembly without the consente of the major part of 
the House." The failure of this attempt to restrict the new 
governor belongs to a later chapter. 

IV. MARYLAND: A PROPRIETARY PROVINCE 

Among the people of Lord Baltimore'.'; colonij, as among English-speaking 
people in general, one might observe a fierce spirit of political liberty coupled 
loith an ingrained respect for law. — Fiske, Old Virginia. 

For Maryland, the plan of colonization was much like 
that of Raleigh's day. George Calvert, a high-minded 
gentleman, had been interested for many years George 
in the expansion of England. He was a member Caivert, 
of the London Company and of the New Eng- first Lord 
land Council (p. 47) ; and finally he took upon Baltimore 
his own shoulders a separate attempt to build a colony. 
In 1623 he secured a charter from King James for a vast 
tract in Newfoundland, with authority to rule settlers there; 



42 EARLY MARYLAND 

and to this Province of Avcdon, with its "Bay of Flowers" 
and "Harbor of Heartsease," he sent out several bodies of 
colonists. Just after receiving the grant, Calvert became a 
Catholic, though that religion was then persecuted sternly 
in England. Until his conversion his life had been spent 
mainly in the public service ; but as a Catholic he could no 
longer hold office. To reward his past services, the King 
made him Baron of Baltimore, and the new peer then spent 
some years in his colony — only to learn by bitter experi- 
ence that he had been misled cruelly as to its climate and 
wealth. 

Broken in health and fortune, Baltimore at last abandoned 
that harsh location, and petitioned King Charles for a 
The Charter i^^ore southerly province. Before the new grant 
of 1632 for was Completed, he died ; but in 1632 the Charter 
ary an £^^ Maryland was issued to his son. The charter 
sanctioned representative self-government. It put the head 
of the Baltimore family in the position, practically, of 
a constitutional king over the settlers, but his great authority 
was limited by one supreme provision, 7iot found in the 
charter to Raleigh : in raising taxes and making laivs, 
the proprietor could act only urith the advice and consent 
of an Assembly of the freemen (landowners) or of their rep- 
resentatives. This recognition of political rights for the 
settlers, in a royal charter, is an onward step in the his- 
tory of liberty. The creation of the Virginia Assembly, 
and the devotion of the Virginians to it, had borne fruit. 
Between 1620 and 1630, it became a settled conviction for 
all Englishmen, at last even for the court circle, that colo- 
nization in America was possible only upon the basis of a 
large measure of self-government. 

And the Maryland Assembly soon won unexpected power. 

The proprietors did not live in the colony. They ruled 

.^ . it through governors, whom they appointed and 

Growth of T • 1 Ml 1 "^ 1 1 1 1 

power in dismissed at will, and to whom they delegated 
the As- such authoritv as thev chose. The governor 

sembly • i / ^\ ^ -i i • i 

was assisted by a small Council, also appointed 
by the proprietor. This proprietary machinery was in- 



GROWTH OF SELF-GOVERNMENT 43 

tended to be the controlling part of the government. 
But within twenty years Maryland grew into a demo- 
cratic commonwealth, with the Assembly for the center 
of authority. 

In 1634 the proprietor sent out the first body of settlers, 
two hundred strong. The governor was directed to call 
an Assembly, but was authorized also to adiourn _ 

. . . The struggle 

and dissolve it at will and to veto any of its over the 
acts. Baltimore himself reserved a further veto, jnit'atiye in 
Moreover, he intended to keep for himself the 
sole right to initiate legislation. He meant to draw up 
all laws in full, and to submit them to the Assembly — 
which might then approve them or reject them, but might 
not amend them. The charter, he pointed out, declared 
that he was to make laws "with the advice and consent" 
of the freemen. This phrase was the same that English 
kings had used for centuries to express the division of power 
between themselves and parliament, and meantime parlia- 
ment had grown in influence until it had gained much 
initiative and was well on the way to become the real law- 
making power. Accordingly, the people of Maryland in- 
sisted upon taking the words in the sense which history had 
given them — and even with some prophetic sense — rather 
than in their literal meaning. 

The first Assembly (1635) passed a code of laws. Balti- 
more vetoed them all, on the ground that the Assembly had 
exceeded its authority. To the next Assembly (1638) 
Baltimore sent a carefully drawn body of laws. After full 
debate, these were rejected by unanimous vote of all the 
representatives. Then the Assembly passed a number of 
bills, several of them based upon those that had been 
presented by Baltimore ; but all these fell before the pro- 
prietor's veto. In the following year, however, Baltimore 
wisely gave wav, and soon ceased all attempts to introduce 
bills. 

Another contest concerned the make-up of the x\s- 
sembly. The first Assemblies were "primary" gatherings, 
to which all freemen might come; but to the spring As- 



44 EARLY MARYLAND 

sembly of 1639 each "hundred" (the local unit in early 
Maryland) chose two delegates. Notwithstanding this, from 
The one of the hundreds there appeared two other 

Assembly men claiming a right to sit as members be- 
"represen- cause they "had not consented" to the election! 
tative " Stranger still, the absurd claim was allowed ! 

But the same Assembly decreed that in future there should 
sit only (1) delegates duly chosen and ('2) gentlemen sum- 
moned by the governor's personal writs. In 1641 a defeated 
candidate claimed a right to sit "in his own person," but this 
time the plea was promptly denied. The Assembly had 
become representative. 

The next step was for the Assembly to divide into two 
Houses. At first the Council sat as part of the Assembly 
The division ^^ ^^^^ body witli the freemen or their delegates, 
into two Moreover, the governor summoned other gentle- 

ouses i^^en^ (fg many as he pleased, by personal writs, 
independent of election. These appointed members sym- 
pathized naturally with the proprietor and the governor, 
while the delegates sometimes stood for the interests of 
the settlers. As early as 1642 the differences between the 
two elements, appointed and elected, led the representa- 
tives to propose a division into two "Houses." The at- 
tempt failed because of the governor's veto ; and the 
arrangement did not become law until 1650, six years after 
success had been achieved in Massachusetts (pp. 87-88). 

The Assembly of 1642 attempted also to secure stated 
meetings, independent of a governor's call, and to do away 
The with the governor's right to dissolve them. In 

Assembly's form, these radical attempts failed ; but in reality 

control ,1 A 1 1 7 7 7 • 

over its t'le Assembly soon learned, to control its own sit- 

sittings tings, except in extreme crises, through its power 

over taxation. It granted supplies only for a year at a 
time (so that it had to be called each year), and it 
deferred this vote of supplies until it was ready to ad- 
journ. Not until a generation later was this step adopted 
by the English parliament in its struggle with the 
crown. 



RELIGIOUS I^IATTERS 4-5 

Maryland was also a religious experiment. After George 
Calvert's conversion to Catholicism, he had a new motive 
for wishing to form a colony. He and his son Maryland 
wished to establish a refuge for their persecuted and the 
co-religionists. The charter, therefore, omits the ^ ° ^^ 
usual reference to the oath of supremacy — which good 
Catholics could not take — and probably there was an 









L^r^p-n: //'-> .j^/fv^"^^yV A-i /•■^■''^ y.~^Si M^-'A 'fl*<*«^fo*iVvj J~f_ 
^ ' Cv.v^j ^ ^ f"^^ -*^^ ^'W^*' '^ y'-x-^-'uX /nrr ^KiH, /• *H_ -' ' 

^ ^w^ A^' h^ -Hn' /<!-iA '^:. riiM (T.xvy'A suC yf^^ 'T- A^-^'^<^--^'x 



Facsimile of Instructions from Lord Baltimore to His Brother, Leo Cal- 
vert, regarding the treatment of Protestants in Maryland. 

understanding between king and proprietor that Catholics 
would not be molested. But Maryland was never a Cath- 
olic colony in the sense that the Catholics could have 
made their religion the state religion, or that they could 
have excluded other sects. The most that the devout, 
.high-minded Baltimore could do for his fellow worshipers, 
— possibly all that he wished to do, — was to secure tolera- 
tion for them by compelling them to tolerate others. From 



46 EARLY MARYLAND 

the first there were many Protestants in the colony, possibly 
a majority. Baltimore's instructions to the governor of the 
first expedition enjoined him to permit "no scandal or 
offense" to be given to any of the Protestants. 

When the Puritan Commonwealth was established in 
England, the Puritans in Maryland tried to win control in 

that province. Lord Baltimore then persuaded 
" Toleration the Assembly to enact the Toleration Act of ISJ^d. 
leiq °^ This great law, it is true, threatened death to all 

non-Christians (including Jews and any Unitarians 
of that day) ; but it provided that "no person . , . profess- 
ing to believe in Jesus Christ, shall be in any wise molested 
or discountenanced for his or her religion." 

At a later time the Catholics were persecuted cruelly in 
this colony that they had founded. After the English 
Persecuting Revolution of 1688, the Catholic Baltimore family 
statutes ^g^g deprived of all political power ; and, for a gen- 
CathoUcs eration, Maryland became a royal province. In 
after 1688 17^5 ^he Lord Baltimore of the day, having de- 
clared himself a convert to Protestantism, recovered his 
authority. Meantime the Episcopal Church had been estab- 
lished in Maryland and ferocious statutes, like those then 
in force in England, had been enacted against Catholics, to 
blacken the law books through the rest of the colonial 
period. 



• CHAPTER III 

NEW ENGLAND AND THE PILGRIMS 

After all that can he said for material arid intellectual advantages, it re- 
mains true that moral causes determine the greatness of nations; and no 
nation ever started on its career with a larger proportion of strong characters 
or a higher level of moral earnestness than the English colonies in America. 
— Lecky, England in the Eighteenth Century, II, 2. 

Next to the fugitives whom Moses led out of Egypt, the little shipload of 
outcasts who landed at Plymoidh . . . are destined to influence the future of 
mankind. — James Russell Lowell. 

// Columbus discovered a new continent, the Pilgrims discovered the New 
World. — Gold WIN Smith. 

In 1620, roused by the success of the London Company 
at Jamestown, some members of the Plymouth branch of 
the old Virginia Company reorganized as "The xhe Council 
Council resident in Plymouth . . . for the plant- for New 
ing of New England," and a royal charter gave ^^^^ 
this body powers similar to those of the London Company, 
with a grant of all North America between the 40th parallel 
and the 48th. 

This "New England Council," or "Plymouth Council," 
sent out no colonists. Instead, it sold or granted tracts of 
land, with various privileges, to adventurers who . ^ 

And com- 

undertook to found settlements. One such charter merciai 
it sold to agents representing the struggling Pil- attempts at^ 
grim colony, which, by accident, had been founded 
within the New England Council's territory (p. 53). Some 
small trading stations, also, were established under such 
grants ; and in 1623 there came a more ambitious attempt. 
Robert Gorges, son of the most active member of the 
Plymouth Council, was granted lands near Boston harbor, 
with a charter empowering him to rule settlers "accord- 

47 



48 



BEGINNINGS OF NEW ENGLAND 



ing to such lawes as shall be hereafter established by 
public authoritie of the state assembled in Parliament 
in New England.'' The Council also commissioned him 
^'General Governor" of all settlements to be formed in 
their vast territory, — which caused the feeble Pilgrim 
colony to dread his coming. He brought to Massachusetts 
Bay an excellent company, containing several "gentlemen," 
two clergymen, and selected farmers and mechanics ; but 




VIRGINIA AND 

NEW ENGLAND 

1620 



after one winter the colony broke up. The gentle Bradford, 
governor and historian of Plymouth, wrote with unusually 
grim humor that Gorges departed, "haveing scarce saluted 
the Cuntrie of his Government, not finding the state of 
things hear to answer his qualitie." 

The forces at work so far in settling New England, except 
for the Pilgrims at Plymouth, were mainly commercial. 
But success was to come from a new force just ready to take 
up the work of colonization. 



AND ENGLISH PURITANISM 49 

This force urns Puritanism. The "established" church in 
England was the Episcopalian. Within that church the dom- 
inant party had strong "High-church" leanings p^j.j^^j^gjj^ 
and was ardently supported by the royal "head of 
the church," — Elizabeth, James, Charles, in turn ; but it was 
engaged in constant struggle with a large, aggressive Puritan 
element. Puritanism was much more than a religious sect. It 
was an ardent aspiration for reform in many lines. In poli- 
tics, it stood for an advance in popular rights; in conduct, 
for stricter and higher morality ; in theology, for the stern 
doctrines of Calvinism, which appealed powerfully to the 
strongest souls of that age ; in church matters, for an exten- 
sion of the "reformation" that had cut off the English 
Church from Rome. 

Tivo groups of English Puritans stood in sharp opposi- 
tion to each other, — the influential '' Loiv-church'' element 
within the church, and the despised Separatists .. j^^^_ 
outside of it. The Low-churchmen had no wish church " 
to separate church and state. They wished one 
national church, — a Low-church church, — to which every- 
body within England should conform. They desired also 
to make the church a more far-reaching moral power. To 
that end they aimed to introduce more preaching into the 
service and to simplify ceremonies, — to do away with the 
surplice, with the ring in the marriage service, with the sign 
of the cross in baptism, and perhaps with the prayer-book. 
Most of them did not care to change radically the govern- 
ment of the English Church, but some among them spoke 
with scant respect of bishops. 

The Independents, or "Puritans of the Separation," be- 
lieved that there should be no national church, but that reli- 
gious societies should be wholly separate from the And the 
state. They wished each local religious organiza- Separatists 
tion a little democratic society independent in government 
even of other churches. To all other sects the ^j^^ py. 
Separatists seemed the most dangerous of radi- grims in 
cals, — mere anarchists in religion. They had 
been persecuted savagely by Queen Elizabeth, and some of 



50 NEW ENGLAND 

their societies had fled to Holland. In 1608, early in the 
reign of James, one of their few remaining churches — a 
little congregation from the village of Scrooby — managed to 
escape to that same land, "wher they heard was freedome 
of Religion for all men" : — 

"... a countrie wher they must learn a new language and get 
their livings they knew not how . . . not acquainted with trads 
or traffique, by which that countrie doth subsist, but . . . used to 
a plaine countrie life and the inocente trade of husbandrey." ^ 

They first settled in Amsterdam, but had no sooner begun 
to feel safe in some measure, through toil and industry, 
from "the grime and grisly face of povertie coming upon 
them like an armed man," than it seemed needful to move 
again, this time to Leyden ; and 

"being now hear pitchet, they fell to such trads and imployments 
as they best could, valewing peace and their spirituall comforte 
above all other riches . . . injoyinge much sweete and delighte- 
full societie ... in the wayes of God" . . . but subject to such 
"greate labor and hard fare" that "many that desired to be with 
them . . . and to enjoye the libertie of the gospell . . . chose the 
prisons in England rather than this hbertie in Holland." 

After some ten years in Holland, the Pilgrims decided 
to remove once more, to the wilds of North America. Brad- 
Reasons for ^^^^ gives three motives for this : an easier liveli- 
removai to hood, especially for their children ; the removal 
America ^£ their children from what they considered the 
loose morals of easy-going Dutch society ; and the preserva- 
tion of their religious principles : — 

"Old age beganne to steale on many of them (and their greate 
and continuall labours . . . hastened it before the time). And 
many of their children that were of the best dispositions and 
gracious inclinations, haveing learnde to bear the yoake in their 
youth, and willing to bear parte of their parents burdens, were 
often times so oppressed with heavie labours that . . . their 

^ William Bradford, in his History of Plymovih Plantation. The quoted passages 
in the following paragraphs upon Plymouth are from this source when no other 
authority is mentioned. 



THE PILGRIMS 51 

bodies . . . became decreped in their early youth, the vigour of 
nature being consumed in the very budd, as it were. 

"But that which was ... of all sorrows most heavie to be 
borne, — many of their children, by these occasions and the greate 
licentiousnes in that countrie, and the manifold temptations of the 
place, were drawn away . . . into extravagante and dangerous 
courses, tending to dissolutenes and the danger of their souls." 

Winslow (another Pilgrim historian) puts emphasis on a 
fourth reason, — a patriotic desire to establish themselves 
under the English flag, — one of their chief griefs in Holland 
being that their children intermarried with the Dutch and 
were drawn away from their English tongue and manners. 

Of these four motives, the religious one was beyond doubt 
the weightiest. In Holland, there was no growth for their 
Society. It would die out, as the older members ^j^^ j.^_ 
passed off the scene ; and with it would die their Ugious 
principles. But, if they established themselves ™°*'^® 
in a New World, "a greate hope and inward zeall they had 
of laying some good foundation for the propagating and 
advancing the gospell of the kingdome of Christ in those 
remote parts of the world ; yea, though they should be but 
even as stepping-stones unto others for the performing of so 
greate a work." 

From the London Company the Pilgrims secured a grant 
of land and a charter ; and, by entering into partnership 
with another group of London merchants, they ^j^^ ^^^ 
secured the necessary money. For many months, from the 
says Bradford, this opening business was "de- London 
layed by many rubbs ; for the Virginia Counsell 
was so disturbed with factions as no bussines could goe for- 
ward." But when Sandys and the Puritan faction got 
control in that Company, the matter was quickly arranged, 
— the more quickly, perhaps, because Brewster, one of the 
Pilgrim leaders, had been a trusted steward of a manor 
belonging to the Sandys family. 

The seventy "merchant adventurers" who furnished 
funds, subscribed stock in £10 shares. Captain John 



52 THE PILGRIMS AT PLYMOUTH 

Smith says that by 1623 they had advanced more than 
$200,000 in modern vahies. Each emigrant was counted 
Partnership ^^ holding one share for "adventuring" himself, 
with London That is, the emigrant and the capital that brought 
mere an s ^^[j^^ ^q America went into equal partnership. 
Each emigrant who furnished money or supplies was given 
more shares upon the same terms as the merchants. For 
seven years all wealth produced was to go into a common 
stock, but from that stock the colonists were to have "meate, 
drink, apparell, and all provissions." The partnership was 
then to be dissolved, each colonist and each merchant taking 
from the common property according to his shares of stock. 

The arrangement was clumsy, because it involved a system 
of labor in common ; but it was generous toward the settlers. 
Penniless immigrants to Virginia became "servants," as 
separate, helpless individuals, to work for seven years under 
overseers and at the end of the time to receive merely their 
freedom and some wild land. The penniless Pilgrims were 
"servants" for a time, in a sense; but only as one large 
body, and to a company of which they themselves were 
part : and their persons were controlled, and their labors 
directed, by officers chosen by themselves from their own 
number. The settlers, it is true, felt aggrieved that the 
merchants did not grant them also for themselves one third 
of their time, together with the houses they might build and 
the land they might improve. But it is clear now that under 
such an arrangement the merchants would have lost their 
whole venture. As it was, they made no profit. 

Two heart-breaking years dragged along in these nego- 
tiations with the Virginia Company and the London 
The May- merchants; and the season of 1620 was far 
flower wasted when (September 16) the Mayfloioer at 

last set sail. Most of the congregation stayed at Leyden 
to await the outcome of this first expedition, and only 102 
of the more robust embarked for the venture. 

They meant to settle "in the northern part of Virginia," 
— somewhere south of the Hudson. But the little vessel 
was tossed by the autumn storms until the captain lost his 



THE MAYFLOWER COMPACT 53 

reckoning; and they made land, after ten weeks, on the 
bleak shore of New England, already in the ckitch of winter 
(November 21). The tempestuous season, and Settlement 
the dangerous shoals off Cape Cod, made it un- ** Plymouth 
wise to continue the voyage. For some weeks they explored 
the coast in small boats, and finally decided to make their 
home at Plymouth; but it was not till the fourth day of 
January (New Style) that they "beganne to erecte the first 



I 

->««T^eeA ^ co^^^^^er.4 /,^y ^«er^^^./ ofy Cofo^^t : <hr^ 



The Mayflower Compact. From the original manuscript of Bradford's 
Plimouth Plantation. 

house, for commone use, to receive them and their goods." 
Meantime, they had adopted the Mayflower Compact. 
The charter from the Virginia Company had provided that 
they should be governed by officers of their own ^j^^ 
choosing. That grant, however, had no force Mayflower 
outside Virginia ; and " some of the strangers ^ o^p^c 
among them let fall mutinous speeches," threatening "to 

1 Part of the expedition had joined it in England, without previous connection 
with the Leyden congregation. They had also a few "servants." 



54 THE PILGRIMS AT PLYMOUTH 

use their own libertie." To prevent such anarchy, the 
Pilgrims, before landing, drew up and signed a " Compact," 
believing "that shuch an acte by them done . . . might be 
as firme as any patent." 

This famous agreement has sometimes been called, care- 
lessly, a written constitution of an independent state. 
This it is not. It does not hint at independence, but ex- 
presses lavish allegiance to the English crown. And it is 
not a constitution though it does resemble a preamble to 
one : it does not determine what officers there should be, or 
how or when they should be chosen, or what powers they 
should have. The signers declare their intention (in the 
absence of established authority) to maintain order by up- 
holding the will of the majority of their own company. 
A prelude And herein lies the peculiar distinction of this 
to many document. It is the first of a long series of similar 
ments in agreements in America, in regions where settle- 
America ment has for a time outrun government, — first, 
on the coast of Maine and New Hampshire, then in the 
woods of Kentucky and Tennessee, then on the prairies of 
Illinois and Iowa, and very recently in Western mining 
camps. Rare among other peoples, this characteristic and 
saving American genius for finding a basis for law and order 
in the supremacy of the common will .dates from these early, 
humble English settlers at Plymouth. 

The way in which the new government was put in action 
is told by Bradford in few words : — 

"Then [as soon as the compact had been signed, while still in 
the Mayflower cabin] tliey choose, or rather confirmed, Mr. John 
Carver their Gouvernor for that year. [Carver had probably been 
made governor before, under authority of the charter ; such action 
would now need to be "confirmed."] And after they had pro- 
vided a place for their goods . . . and begunne some small cot- 
tages, as time would admitte, they mette and consulted of lawes 
and orders." 

Expectations of quick-won wealth in America still dazzled 
men's minds. In 1624 Captain John Smith wrote: "I 



DISAPPOINTMENTS AND HARDSHIPS 55 

promise no Mines of gold; yet, . . . New England hath 
yeelded already, by generall computation, £100,000 at least 
in the fisheries. Therefore, honourable country- Expectations 
men let not the meanness of the word fish dis- °^ wealth 
taste you, for it will afford as good gold as the Mines of 
Guiana, or Potassie, with less hazard and charge, and more 
certainty." Individual traders, too, had sometimes made 
sudden fortunes in the fur trade. Accordingly, the Pilgrims 
expected to give most of their energies to these sources of 
magic riches. Pastor Robinson wrote, as late as June 14, 
1620: "Let this spetially be borne in minde, that the 
greatest parte of the collonie is like to be imployed con- 
stantly, not upon dressing ther perticuler lands, and building 
houses, but upon fishing, trading, etc." 

Such delusions faded quickly before stern facts, oisappoint- 
The first months, in particular, were a time of cruel ments and 
hardship. Says Bradford, — ^^ ^ *^^ 

"Now, summer being done, all things stand upon them with a 
wetherbeaten face; and the whole countrie, full of woods and 
thickets, represented a wild and savage hiew. ... In 2 or 3 
months time, halfe their company dyed . . . wanting houses and 
other comforts ; [and of the rest] in the time of most distres, ther 
was but 6 or 7 sound persons" to care for all the sick and dying. 

Of the eighteen married women who landed in January, 
May found living only four. The settlement escaped the 
tomahawk that first terrible winter only because a plague 
(probably the smallpox, caught from some trading vessel) 
had destroyed the Indians in the neighborhood. But when 
Spring came and the Mayflower sailed for England, not one 
person of the steadfast colony went with her. In Holland 
they had carefully pondered the dangers that might assail 
them, and had highly concluded "that all grate and honor- 
able actions must be enterprised and overcome with answer- 
able courages." 

For many years more the settlement had a stern struggle 
for bare life. For the fur trade, of course, the inexperienced 
Pilgrims were wholly unfit; and, in any case,. to set up a 



56 



THE PLYMOUTH PILGRIMS 



permanent colony, with women and children, called press- 
ingly for attention to raising food and building homes. 
The "supplies" expected from the London partners came, 
from year to year, in too meager measure to care even for 
the new immigrants who appeared along with them ; and 
the crops of European grains failed season after season. 
Fortunately, during the first winter, the colonists found a 
supply of Indian corn, for seed, and a friendly native to 
teach them how to cultivate it ; and the old cornfields of the 
abandoned Indian villages saved them the formidable labor 




Pilgrims Going to " Meeting." From the painting by Boughton. 



of clearing away the forest. The slow progress, even then, 
toward a secure supply of food is shown vividly in a letter 
from Edward Winslow at the end of the first year : — 

"We have built seven dwelling houses, and four for the use of 
the plantation [for common use, that is, as storehouses, etc.], 
and have made preparation for divers others. We set, the last 
spring, some twenty acres of Indian corn, and sowed some six 
acres of barley and pease. . . . God be praised, we had good 
increase of [the] Indian corn, and of our barley, indifferent good, 
but our pease not worth the gathering.'' [Winslow explains this 
failure of the European seed by the colonists' ignorance of the 
seasons in America.] 



DISAPPOINTMENTS AND HARDSHIPS 57 

In the first year, then, the settlers had built only eleven rude 
cabins and had brought only twenty-six acres of land into 
cultivation. Winslow was writing to a friend in England 
who expected soon to join the colony. The following advice 
in the same letter suggests forcefully some features of life in 
the new settlement : — 

"Bring every man a musket. . . . Let it be long in the barrel, 
and fear not the weight of it ; for most of our shooting is from 
stands [rests]. If you bring anything for comfort [that is, any- 
thing more than bare necessaries], butter or sallet oil . . . [is] 
very good. . . . Bring paper and linseed oile for your windows, 
and cotton yarn for your lamps [for wicks]." 

For long the governor's most important duty was to 
direct the work in the fields — where he toiled, too, with his 
own hands, along with all the men and the larger 
boys. But even among these "sober and godly Failure of 

,, , P • 1 • 1 industry in 

men the system oi mdustry m common proved common 
a hindrance : — 

"For this communitie was found to breed much confusion and 
discontente, and retard much imployment that would have been 
to their benefite and comforte. For the yung-men, that were most 
able and fitte, . . . did repine that they should spend their time 
and strength to worke for other mens wives and children. . . . 
The aged and graver men, to be ranked and equalised in labours 
and victuals, cloaths. etc., with the younger and meaner sorte, 
thought it some indignitie and disrespect unto them. And for 
mens wives to be commanded to doe service for other men, as 
dressing their meate, washing their cloaths, etc., they deemed it a 
kind of slaverie; neither could many husbands well brooke it." 

In the third year, famine seemed imminent. Then G o vernor 
Bradford, with the approval of the chief men of the colony, 
set aside the agreement with the London partners in this 
matter of common industry, and assigned to each family a 
parcel of land "for the time only." Such trade and fish- 
ery as were carried on remained under common manage- 
ment ; and even these parcels of land did not then become 



58 THE PLYMOUTH PILGRIMS 

private property. Only their temporary 7isc was given. 
But, says Bradford, "This had very good success," — 

"for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corne was 
planted then other waise would have been, by any means the 
Governour or any other could use. . . . The women now wente 
willingly into the field, and tooke their litle-ons with them to set 
corne, which before would aledge weakness . . . whom to have 
compelled would have bene thought great tiranie." 

For other reasons, too, the danger of failure passed away. 
The Pilgrims were learning to use the opportunities about 
Success. them. In 1627, when the partnership was to have 
and settle- expired, little had been done, it is true, toward 
the EngUsh repaying the London merchants. But the begin- 
partners niug of a promising fur trade had been secured ; 
and Bradford, with seven other leading men, offered to as- 
sume the English debt if they might have control of this 
trade to raise the money. This arrangement was accepted 
by all parties. It took Bradford fourteen years more to 
pay the merchants. But meantime the merchants at once 
surrendered their claim upon the colony ; and the lands, 
houses, and cattle were promptly divided among the set- 
tlers for private property. 

The political development of Plymouth may be summed 
up briefly. Governor Carver died during the first spring. 
Political de- The next governor, William Bradford, was re- 
veiopment elected year after year until his death, in 1657, ex- 
cept for five years when he absolutely refused to serve. The 
Assembly was the essential part of the government. For many 
years it was, in form, merely a town meeting, — a mass meet- 
ing of the voters of one small village. Soon after 1630, other 
settlements grew up in the colony, but even then the As- 
sembly continued for a time to be a meeting of all male citi- 
zens, held in the oldest town. However, this clumsy and 
unfair system could not last among Englishmen. In 1636 
the three chief towns sent representatives to sit with the 
governor and Assistants to revise and codify the laws. The 
same device was used the next year in assessing taxes among 



DEMOCRACY IN RELIGION AND POLITICS 59 

the towns. And in 1639 it was decided that thereafter the 
Assembly should be made up of such representatives, with 
the governor and Assistants. There was never a division 
into two "Houses." 

As other villages grew up about the original settlement at 
Plymouth town, their constables and other necessary officers 
were at first appointed by the central Assembly. But, 
soon after the central government became representative, 
the various settlements became " towns" in a political sense, 
with town meetings and their own elected officers, after a 
method introduced just before in Massachusetts Bay (p. 88). 

The first voters were the forty-one signers of the May- 
flower Compact. Twenty-five adult males did not sign. 
Some of these were regarded as represented by The 
fathers who did sign, and eleven were servants or franchise 
temporary employees ; but the absence of other names can 
be explained only on the ground that certain men did not 
wish to sign or that they were not asked to do so. Those 
who did sign made up the original Assembly. Thereafter, 
the Assembly admitted to citizenship as it saw fit. For a 
time it gave the franchise to nearly all men who came to the 
colony. But in 1660 a law required that new voters must 
have a specified amount of property; and after 1671 the 
franchise was restricted further to those who could present 
''satisfactory" proof that they were "sober and peaceable " 
in conduct and ''orthodox in the fundamentals of religion.'' 
In practice, this limited the franchise to church members. 

Political democracy at Plymouth urns an outgrowth of eco- 
nomic and social democracy . There were no materials for 
anything else but democracy. Robinson, in a ^j^^ causes 
farewell letter (Pastor Robinson remained with of political 
the main congregation at Leyden), regards it a ^^°"^^^ 
misfortune that the Pilgrims "are not furnished with any 
persons of spetiall eminencie above the rest, to be chosen into 
offices of governmente." Had such persons been present, 
public feeling would probably have made them an aristocracy 
of office. In that day, democracy rarely went further than 
to suggest that common men ought to have a voice in select- 



60 



THE PLYMOUTH PILGRIMS 



ing their rulers : the actual rulers were to be selected from 
the upper classes. But in Plymouth no one was rich, even 
by colonial standards ; and, more than in any other impor- 
tant colony, all the settlers came from the "plain people." 
Hardly any of them except Winslow and Standish would 
have ranked as "gentle- 
men" in England. 
Bradford, there, would 
have remained a poor 
yeoman, and John Alden 
a cooper. 

But, in even greater 
degree, democracy in 
politics at Plymouth re- 
sulted from democracy 
in the church, — and 
this ecclesiastical de- 
mocracy ivas the essence 
of the Pilgrim experi- 
ment. Plymouth was, 
first, a religious society ; 
then, an economic enter- 
prise; and, last, and 

incidentally, a political Governor Edward Winslow, at the age of 

57. From a portrait (now in Pilgrim Hall, 
Plymouth) painted in England in 1653 while 
Winslow was detained there on a diplomatic 
mission, to arrange relations between Plym- 
outh and the new Puritan Commonwealth. 
This was one of his four missions to Eng- 
land. Bradford was the administrative head 
of Plymouth; Standish, its military chief; 
Winslow, its statesman and man of affairs. 
He is the only Pilgrim of whom we have an 
authentic portrait. 




Charters 
and land 
titles 



commonwealth. 

Plymouth never se- 
cured a royal charter, 
and its gov- 
ernment re- 
mained upon 
the basis of the May- 
flower Compact until 
King William III annexed the colony to Massachusetts in 
1691. Nor did the early settlers have legal title to their 
land. In 1680, however, the proprietary New England 
Council granted the territory to Bradford as trustee for the 
colony. Bradford kept the grant until he and his seven 
associates had paid off the huge debt they had assumed 



THEIR PLACE IN HISTORY 61 

for the colony. Then, in 1641, with solemn ceremony, he 
surrendered his rights to the whole body of settlers. The 
colony then gave legal titles to the assignments of land it 
had previously made. 

The colony grew slowly, counting less than three hundred 
people in 1630, when the great Puritan migration to 
Massachusetts Bay began. The Puritan colonies, piace in 
then established, grew much faster and taught i"story 
more important lessons in politics and economics. Plymouth 
had little direct influence, in either of these ways, upon later 
American history. It did have a large part in directing the 
later Puritan colonies, much against their first intention, 
toward church independency and so toward religious de- 
mocracy ; but its immediate service, after all, lay in 
pointing the way for that later and greater migration. 
This the Pilgrims did ; and with right their friends wrote 
them later, when the little colony was already overshadowed 
by its neighbors, — ''Let it not he grievous to you that you 
have been hut instruments to hreak the ice for others : the honor 
shall he yours till the world's end." 



CHAPTER IV 

MASSACHUSETTS BAY 

L THE FOUNDING 

God hath sifted a nation, that he might send choice grain into this wilder- 
ness. — William Stoughton, "Election Sermon,^' in 1690. 

One of the several partnerships of English merchants 
engaged in the New England fisheries (and so in establish- 
ing subsidiary stations along the coast) finally 
pany for became incorporated as The Co7npany for Massa- 
Massa- chuseUs Bay. In the spring of 16^8 this Com- 

pany bought from the New England Council the 
territory between the Charles and the Merrimac rivers (ex- 
tending west to the Pacific), and during the summer it sent 
out sixty settlers under John Endicott, a well-known Puritan 
gentleman, to a station near Cape Ann, A few 
settlement " old Settlers" there were at first inclined to dis-. 
under pute Eudicott's authority, but finally they recog- 

nized him peaceably as head of the settlement — 
to which accordingly he gave the Hebrew name Salem 
(Peace) . 

A year later (March 14, 1629), the Massachusetts Com- 
pany secured a charter from King Charles. At the time this 
The Charter " Fif-^i Charter of Massachusetts Bay'' (as it came 
of Massa- to be called later) was merely a grant to the 
c usetts ay commercial proprietary company in England. It 
confirmed their title to the land they had bought from the 
New England Council, and it gave them jurisdiction over 
settlers, similar to the authority possessed by other coloniz- 
ing companies in England, though more restricted. It did not 
authorize capital punishment, martial law, control over im- 
migration, or coinage of money, though all these powers 
were later exercised under it. 

62 



THE FOUNDING 63 

The Company now busied itself diligently in collecting 
supplies of all sorts and in seeking out desirable emigrants 
of various trades. In May of 16'29 it sent out its second 
expedition, of some 200 settlers, led by Francis Higginson, 
a Puritan minister. Soon after, a Puritan church was 
organized in Salem. 

So far the history of the colony is like that of other com- 
mercial plantations. Most of the settlers were "servants," 
and rather a worthless lot. The chief men were Puritans 
because it was easier just then for an emigration from England 
to find fit leaders among the Puritans than among other 
classes ; and the proprietary Company was Puritan, on the 
whole, because almost the whole merchant class in England 
was Puritan. But there is no evidence that anyone was 
planning, as yet, to build a Puritan colony. Later in this 
same summer of 1629 , however, a new colonizing movement 
began, ivith that special purpose. 

This new movement was due to a new danger to Puritan- 
ism in England. For years, despite the strenuous efforts 
of the Puritans, the English Church had been Thecoioniz- 
carried farther and farther away from their ideals. ^"^ move- 

•1 11 j> ^ TT'i nient 

Bishop Laud, the tireless leader oi the High- becomes 
church movement, was ardently supported by P""tan 
King Charles. All high ecclesiastical offices had been 
turned over to Laud's followers; and his "High Commis- 
sion" court, with dungeon and pillory, was now ready to 
drive Puritan pastors from their parishes. 

The Puritans had rested their hope upon parliament. 
They made the great majority in the House of Commons; 
and with the meeting of the third parliament of ^^^^^ ^_ 
Charles (1628), their reform seemed on the verge mentof the 
of success. That parliament extorted the King's ^JJ^j^^^^^ ^"^ 
assent to the famous " Petition of Right " ; and, 
in the winter of 1629, it began vigorously to regulate the 
Church. But the King struck a despotic blow. March 2, 
he dissolved parliament, sent its leaders to the Tower, 
and entered upon a system of absolute rule. For eleven 



64 MASSACHUSETTS BAY 

year? no parliament was to meet in England. Religious re- 
form and political liberty had gone down in common ruin, 
the end of which no man then could see. The gloom of 
English Puritans at this outlook is expressed in a letter 
(June, Wi9) from John Winthrop in London to his wife at 
their manor house : — 

"I am verily persuaded God will bringe some heavye Affliction 
upon this Land, and that speedylye." The times, he continues, 
grow worse and worse ; all the other churches (outside England) 
have been smitten and made to drink the cup of tribulation even 
unto death. England, seeing all this, had not turned from its evil 
ways. "Therefore He is turninge the Cuppe towards us also, 
and because we are the last, our portion must be to drink the verye 
dreggs." 

The continent of Europe offered no hope. Every form of 
Protestantism there seemed doomed. Wallenstein's victo- 
No hope in Hous troopers were turning the Protestant prov- 
Europe inccs of Germany into wilderness homes for wild 

beasts ; and in France the all-powerful Richelieu had crushed 
the Huguenots. Accordingly, the more dauntless of the 
English Puritans turned their eyes to the New World. And 
there they saw a marvelous opportunity. At Plymouth was 
the colony of the Separatists, not large, but safely past the 
stage of experiment ; while close by was the prosperous be- 
ginning of a commercial colony controlled by a Puritan 
company in England and managed on the spot by well- 
known Puritans like Endicott and Higginson. How natural 
to try to convert this Massachusetts into a refuge for Low- 
church Puritanism, such as Plymouth already was for "Puri- 
tans of the Separation." 

But the leaders of this new movement had no idea of 
becoming part of a mere plantation governed by a distant 
The Cam- proprietary company, however friendly. They 
bridge were of the ruling aristocracv of England, — 

August, justices of their counties, and, on occasion, mem- 

1629 })gpg Qf parliament. And so a number of them 

gathered, by long horseback journeys, and signed the 



THE CAMBRIDGE AGREEMENT 65 

famous Cambridge Agreement (August 25), promising one 
another solemnly that they would embark for Massachu- 
setts with their families and fortunes, if they could find a 
ivaytotake with them the charter and the "whole government.'' 
A proposal to transfer the government of the Company to 
America had been made a month before at the July meeting 
of the Company in London. The plan was novel to most of 
the members ; but in September, after repeated debates, it 
was approved. Commercial motives faded beside the 
supreme desire to provide a safe refuge for Puritan principles. 

The new men of the Cambridge Agreement now bought 
stock ; many old stockholders drew out ; the old officers 
resigned, since they did not wish to emigrate ; a " corpora- 
and John Winthrop, the most prominent of the tion colony" 
new men, was elected governor (Uctober, charter in 
1629). The next spring, Winthrop led to Massa- America 
chusetts a great Puritan migration, — the most remarkable 
colonizing expedition that the world had ever seen. For 
the first time a proprietary corporation removed to its col- 
ony. Colony and corporation merged. Massachusetts be- 
came a corporate colony and a Puritan commomvealth. 

In May, 1629, Endicott had a hundred settlers at Salem. 
In June, when Higginson arrived with two hundred more, 
another plantation was begun at Charlestown.^ 
Now, in the summer of 1630, seventeen ships winthrops 
brought two thousand settlers to Massachusetts, settlement 

1 • 1 T-» *° 1030 

and SIX new towns were started, — Boston, 
Dorchester, Watertown, Roxbury, and minor settlements 
at Lynn (Saugus) and Newtown, afterward Cambridge 
(map, p. 99). 

But the immigrants found conditions sadly different 
from their expectations. Two hundred returned home in the 

' The next winter slew nearly a third of the colonists ; and in June of 1630 Win- 
throp found the survivors starving and demoralized. Four fifths of them were 
servants of the eorapany; but they had accomplished nothing, and Winthrop 
thought it cheaper to free them than to feed them. There were also seven other 
little settlements along the coast — like that of Blackstone at Boston — with a 
total population of some fifty souls, remnants of the commercial attempts mentioned 
above. 



66 MASSACHUSETTS BAY 

ships that brought them, or sought better prospects in 
other colonies ; and two hundred more died before Decem- 
Eariy ber. Immediately on his arrival, Winthrop, in 

hardships fear of famine before the next summer, wisely 
hurried back a ship for supplies. Its prompt return, in 
February, saved the colony. According to one story, Win- 
throp had just given his last measure of meal to a destitute 
neighbor. Meantime the deserters spread such discourage- 
ment in England that for the next two years emigration 
to Massachusetts ceased. In 1633, however, it began again. 
Soon after, the King seemed for a time to have established 
a legal claim to the power of arbitrary taxation (in the 
famous "ship-money" controversy). This gave new im- 
petus to the Puritan emigration, and it went on, at the 
average volume of three thousand people a year, until the 
Long Parliament was summoned. 

Thus the eleven years of "No Parliament" in England saw 
twenty-five thousand selected Englishmen transported to 
"The Great Ncw England. Tliis was the ''Great Migration'^ 
Migration," of 1630-1640. In 1640 the movement stopped 
1630-1640 sl^ort. Says Winthrop, "The parliament in Eng- 
land setting upon a general reformation both in church and 
state, . . . this caused all men to stay in England in expec- 
tation of a New World'" there. Indeed, the migration 
turned the other way ; and many of the boldest and best 
New England Puritans hurried back to the old home, now 
that there was a chance to fight for Puritan principles 
there. Winthrop's third son and one of his nephews went 
back and rose to the rank of general under Cromwell, 
while the Reverend Hugh Peter, — rather a troublesome 
busybody in the colony, — became Cromwell's chaplain. 
Such facts help us to understand that the larger figures on 
the small New England stage, like Winthrop and his gallant 
son John Winthrop, Jr., were fit companions for the greatest 
actors on the great European stage in that great day. 

The sudden stop in immigration caused serious industrial de- 
pression. Until that time the colony had been unable to raise 
sufficient supplies for its use. Newcomers brought money with 



MINGLED MOTIVES 67 

them, and gladly paid for cattle and food the price in England plus 
the cost of transportation. In an instant this was changed. The 
colony had more of such supplies than it could use, and high freights 
made export impossible. Both Bradford and Winthrop lament 
the fall in prices, — for a cow from £20 to £5, etc., — without 
very clear ideas as to its cause. The phenomenon has been re- 
peated many times on our moving frontier. 

New England had no further immigration of consequence 
until after the Revolution. But this coming of the Puritans, 
during England's ten hopeless years, is one of ^^^^j^^ 
the fruitful facts in history. The twenty-five influence on 
thousand are the ancestors of perhaps a sixth of ^encan 
our population to-day ; and we owe to them much 
more than a sixth of our higher life in America. Said an old 
Puritan preacher, with high insight, "God hath sifted a 
nation, that he might send choice grain into this wilderness." 
That sifting took place just when England had been lifted 
to her loftiest pitch of moral grandeur, during the most 
heroic episode of her most heroic century, and the *' choice 
grain" has given to America not only the troublesome 
"New England conscience" but also that finer thing, a 
share in the Puritan's faith in ideals. 

True, motives were not unmixed. The twenty-five thou- 
sand were not all Puritans; and the Puritans were not 
all saints. Some little communities were made 
up wholly of rude fishermen. Old Cotton Mather motives 
tells how a preacher from another town, visiting besides the 

rclisious 

Marblehead and praising the devotion of the 
people to religious principle, was interrupted by a rough 
voice, — "You think you are talking to the people of the 
Bay : ive came here to catch fish." Then the Puritan 
settlements themselves contained many "servants." Win- 
throp alone brought in his "household" some twenty 
male servants, several of whom were married. Many of 
this servant population were a bad lot, with the natural 
vices of an irresponsible, untrained, hopeless class. On the 
voyage, cheats and drunkards from among them had to 



68 MASSACHUSETTS BAY 

receive severe punishment ; and, arrived in America, the 
better ones were sometimes demorahzed. They saw vaster 
chance for free labor than they had ever dreamed — but 
they had ignorantly bound themselves to service through 
the best years of life. Brooding on this led some to crime or 
suicide. 

The great body of the Puritans themselves had been shop- 
keepers, artisans, and small farmers in England. They were 
plain, uneducated men who folloived a trusted minister or 
an honored neighbor of the gentry class. In the main they 
came, not to build an ideal state, like their leaders, but 
merely to get away from the pressure of poverty. They had 
felt keenly the force of Winthrop's plea : — - 

"This Land growes weary of her Inhabitants, soe as man. who is 
the most pretious of God's creatures, is here ... of less prise 
among us than an horse or a sheepe . . . Why then should we 
stand striving here . . . (many men spending as much labour and 
coste to . . . keepe an acre or tuoe of Land as would procure many 
hundred as good or better in another Countrie) and in the mean- 
time suffer a whole Continent, fruitfull and convenient, to lie 
waste?" 

Nor were the greatest of the Puritans moved by religious 
motives only. They, too, expected to better their worldly 
condition. Even John Winthrop had been induced to 
emigrate, in part, by the decay of his fortune in England. 
As he explained, in the third person, to his friends, "His 
meanes heer are soe shortened as he shall not be able to 
continue in the same place and callinge [as before] ; and 
so, if he should refuse this opportunitye, that talent which God 
hath bestowed upon him for publick service were like to he 
buried.'' Many others of the 1630 migration had been 
deluded by "the too large commendations" of New Eng- 
land which Higginson had sent back in the preceding 
summer. 

But when these dreams faded, the more steadfast spirits 
did not falter, but showed bravely the higher aims that 
moved them most. After the first hard months Winthrop 



SUPREMACY OF RELIGIOUS MOTIVES 69 

wrote back to his wife in noble strain : " I do hope our 
days of affliction will soon have an end . . . Yet we may 
not look for great things here . . . [But] w^e here 
enjoy God and Jesus Christ. I thank God, I like of the 
so well to be here as I do not repent my coming ; religious 

, .„ T • T 11 1 motive 

and II 1 were to come agam, 1 would not have 
altered my course though I had forseen all these afflic- 
tions." And Dudley, one of his stout-hearted companions, 
albeit a blunt man not fond of soft words, speaks with 
gentle charity of "falling short of our expectations, to our 
great prejudice, by means of letters sent us hence into 
England, wherein honest men, out of a desire to draw others 
to them, wrote somewhat hyperhollically of many things 
here," and adds : — 

"If any come hether to plant for worldly ends, that canne 
live well at home, hee eomits an errour of which hee will soon 
repent him. But if for spirittuall, and that noe particular obstacle 
hinder his removeall, he may finde here what may well content 
him : viz., materialls to build, fewell to burn, ground to plant, seas 
and rivers to ffish in, a pure ayer to breath in, good water to drinke 
till wine or beare canne be made, — which, toegether with the 
cowes, hoggs, and goates brought hether all ready, may suffice for 
food ; for as for foule and venison, they are dainties here as well as 
in England. Ffor cloaths and beddinge they must bringe them 
with them, till time and industry produce them here. In a word, 
wee yett enjoy little to bee en\'yed, but endure much to bee pytj'^ed 
in the sicknes and mortalitye of our people. ... If any godly 
men out of religious ends will come over to helpe us ... I thinke 
they cannot dispose of themselves or their estates more to Gods 
glory . . . but they must not bee of the poorer sort yett for diverse 
yeares. Ffor we have found by experience that they have hin- 
dered, not furthered the worke. And for profaine and deboshed 
persons, their oversight in comeinge hether is wondered at, where 
they shall finde nothing to content them." 

After the first winter the colony was never in danger of 
absolute ruin ; but the settlers long suffered more than the 
common hardships of a frontier. They did not Not natural 
take naturally to pioneer life as our later back- pioneers 
woodsmen did. They had no love for the wilderness, nor 



70 EARLY MASSACHUSETTS 

could they adapt themselves readily to its new requirements. 
But they had soberly and prayerfully committed life, family, 
and fortune to a daring experiment, and, like the Pilgrims, 
they too met disaster "with answerable courages." Men, 
who had left stately ancestral manor houses, took up 
life calmly in rudely built log cabins, and never looked 
backward. Famous ministers, who came from the loveliest 
parish churches in peaceful England, preached and gave the 
communion, and married, baptized, and buried, in bleak, 
barn-like "meeting-houses," where each male worshiper 
brought his musket. A pitiable proportion of the babies 
died, year by year, in the harsh climate and draughty 






"Marks" of Nahnanacomock and Passaconaway, affixed to a covenant sub- 
mitting to an order of the General Court; dated June 12, 1644. From the 
Massachusetts State Arcliives. 

houses, and a shocking number of brave, uncomplaining, 
over-burdened women "but took New England on the way 
to Heaven." 

Sparks from the mud-plastered fireplaces and chimneys 
set many a fire. Winthrop's "Journal" speaks repeatedly 
Early of such loss — hoiiie, bam, hay, and stock, often in 

hardships ^^ dead of a winter night ; and Captain John 
Smith chances to mention that at Plymouth in the third 
winter seven of the thirty-two homes burned down. Wolves 
killed the calves of this or that settler, — a serious disaster 
when most stock had still to be brought from England. 
Men, and sometimes women, were lost in short trips through 
the woods, and found frozen to death. Inexperienced fisher- 
men were caught by storms and swept away to sea. Amid 
all this, the gentry kept up as much as they could of the old 



FROM SUFFERING TO COMFORT 



71 



English stateliness. They trod brier-tangled forest paths, 
clad in ruffles, silk hose, long cloak, and cocked hat, and 
solemnly exchanged garments, in token of friendship, with 
painted savages who now and then stalked haughtily into 
the villages to dine with the chief men. 

Slowly, too, the colony worked its way to a rude progress to 
comfort. In 1670 a Boston schoolmaster, Ben- rude 
jamin Thompson, pictures for us how — - *^°™ °^ 

" the dainty Indian maize 
Was eat with clam shells out of wooden trays. 
Under thatched huts without the cry of rent. 
And the best sauce to every dish — Content." 

From the first New England furnished a variety of employ- 
ments. Every free man had his plot of ground, and the 
"gentlemen" soon tried — not very successfully varied 
— to farm large plantations with indentured serv- occupations 
ants. The stony soil forced the settlers at once to take up 




The Cradock House (1636) at Medford. This is the oldest brick house in the 
United States. With the exception of the porch it is in the same condition as 
in colonial times. Cradock was the first governor (president) of the Massa- 
chusetts Company in England. He never came to America, but he did try for 
a time to till some large grants of land there by bands of indentured servants. 
These grants were made him in recognition of his services in England. 



72 



EARLY MASSACHUSETTS 



other work also. Each family raised a few pigs, to supply the 
pork-barrel — and the straying and trespasses of these unruly 
brutes was an incessant source of annoyance and even of dis- 
sension. As soon as possible, men began also to breed cattle. 
The fisheries furnished some profitable export to England, to 

help pay for European 
supplies ; and from the 
woods that reached to 
their doors, the settlers 
fashioned staves and 
clapboards both for 
home use and for export. 
IMills to grind grain ap- 
peared here and there, 
where streams provided 
water power. And, in 
the second year, New 
England's famous ship- 
building and coasting 
trade began, when Win- 
throp launched The 
Blessing of the Bay — a 
small schooner, which 
traded for furs with the 
Indians and with Eng- 
lish settlements along 
the coast, from the 
Kennebec to the Con- 
necticut. Very early 




some prmiitive iron 



A Kettle, now in the Lynn Library, said to be 

the first casting made in America — at the i ») i 

Lynn ^Saugus) Iron Works in 1642. Note WOrks began tO CXtract 

the graceful lines. In 1648 the Lynn Iron iron from the Casilv 

Furnace turned out eight tons a week. i i tti »> i 

worked bog deposits, 
and to "cast" simple implements. In 1646 the Massa- 
chusetts General Court gave a patent to Joseph Jenks for 
certain improvements on the scythe which gave that tool 
its modern form. Brick kilns were among the early indus- 
tries. The first saw-mill did not appear until 1663 — at 



DANGER OF ENGLISH INTERFERENCE 73 

Salmon Falls in New Hampshire. Soon at many points 
such mills were turning the forest about them into rough 
lumber for export to England, while, at clearings remote from 
water power, the logs were burned into potash, or pearl ash. 
Potash in that day was indispensable in manufacturing 
woolen goods and glass and in making soap, and all through 
the colonial period large amounts were sent to Europe. 

For a time, there was danger that England might interfere 
with the Massachusetts experiment. The colony's land, 
which had been bought from the New England Danger of 
Council in 1628, was part of a tract granted earlier English 
by that body to Gorges (p. 47). Probably the i^^^^^^^"" 
trouble came merely from ignorance of A"merican geog- 
raphy. The Massachusetts charter of 16'29 (from the King) 
strengthened the colony's title; and in 1631 the colonial 
government arrested two of Gorges' agents, and, after severe 
handling, shipped them back to England. 

Gorges finally got the matter before the King's Council, 
and that body ordered the leaders of the original Massachu- 
setts Company to produce the charter and explain these 
acts of the colonial government. When it ivas discovered that 
the charter was in America, a series of peremptory demands 
were sent to the authorities there for its return, and legal 
processes were begun in the English courts to overthrow it. 
Meantime, in 1635, the New England Council surrendered 
its charter, and Charles appointed Gorges "governor generaV 
over all New England. Gorges began to build a ship and to 
get together troops. 

The leaders in Massachusetts did not weaken. After con- 
sulting with the ministers, it was agreed, "that, if a general 
governor were sent, we ought not to accept him, but defend 
our lawful possessions (if we are able) ; otherwise, to avoid 
or protract.'' At its next meeting the General Court voted 
a tax of cC'OO (many times larger than had before been 
known in the colony), and began a series of fortifications, 
not on the frontier agai ist the Indians, but on the coast to 
resist an English ship. Bullets 2vere made legal tender in 



74 EARLY MASSACHUSETTS 

place of small coin; and a committee was appointed "to 
manage any war that may befall," with power to establish 
martial law. No one thought of sending back the charter. 
Quaint excuses were sent in plenty ; and, when these 
wore thin, the royal orders were quietly ignored, and, at 
last, openly defied. 

This policy of "protracting" won. Gorges' ship was 
ruined by an accident in launching, and he could not get 
Victory for money to build another or to keep his troops to- 
Massa- gether. The King, economizing rigidly in the 
c usetts midst of the "ship-money" troubles, would give 
commissions, but no gold. The English courts did finally 
declare the charter void (1638) ; but the ship that brought 
word of this brought news also of the rising of the Scots, 
and the colony "thought it safe" bluntly to refuse obedi- 
ence to the "strict order" for the surrender of the docu- 
ment, even hinting rebellion. In England, matters moved 
rapidly to the Civil War, and Massachusetts was left un- 
troubled to work out her experiment. After the Restora- 
tion in England, the legal authorities there decided that, since 
the charter had not actually been surrendered, the process 
against it was ineffective. 

II. ARISTOCRACY VS. DEMOCRACY 

The Puritan fathers did not find it easy to stretch the 
charter of a merchant company into a constitution for a 
Dominant Commonwealth — ^especially as that commonwealth 
anstocracy ^g^g pulled now this way, now that, by contend- 
ing aristocratic and democratic factions. Early Massa- 
chusetts was predominantly aristocratic. The charter pro- 
vided that all important matters of government should be 
settled by the stockholders ("freemen") in four "General 
Courts" each year. But only some twelve freemen of the 
corporation had come to America. These were all of the 
gentry class, — men of strong character and, most of them, of 
prudent judgment. Before leaving England, they had all 
been made magistrates (governor, deputy governor, and 



ARISTOCRACY VS. DEMOCRACY 75 

"Assistants"). Even without such office, and merely as 
freemen, the twelve had sole authority to rule the two thou- 
sand settlers and to make laws for them ; and the little 
oligarchy began at once to use this tremendous power. The 
first meeting of Assistants in America fixed the wages of 
laborers, forbidding a carpenter or mason to take more than 
two shillings a day. 

From the first a democratic movement challenged this oli- 
garchic government. The first General Court was held 
in October, 1630. By death and removal, the 
twelve possessors of power had shrunk to eight, by a demo- 
These eight gentlemen found themselves con- "^^^'^ move- 
fronted by a gathering of one hundred and nine 
sturdy settlers asking to be admitted freemen. This was 
a united demand for citizenship, by nearly all the heads 
of families above the station of unskilled laborers. To 
refuse the request was to risk the wholesale removal of 
dissatisfied colonists either to Maine, where Gorges would 
welcome them, or to Plymouth ; to grant it was to endanger 
the peculiar Puritan commonwealth at which the leaders 
aimed, and to introduce more democracy than they believed 
safe. 

In this dilemma, the shrewd leaders tried to give the shadow 
and keep the substance. They postponed action on the 
application until the next spring. Meantime they passed 
two laws — in violation of the charter : first (October, 1630), 
that the Assistants, instead of the whole body of freemen, 
should make laws and choose the governor ; and second 
(May, 1631), that the Assistants should hold office during 
good behavior, instead of all going out of office at the 
end of a year as the charter ordered. Then they ad- 
mitted 116 new freemen, having left them no power ex- 
cept that of electing new Assistants "when these are to 
be chosen." 

The applicants, in their anxiety to get into the body politic, 
agreed for a time to these usurpations. Indeed they did not 
know what their rights should be. The charter was locked 
in Winthrop's chest, and only the magistrates had read 



76 EARLY MASSACHUSETTS 

it or heard it. For a year more, that Httle body, now 
shrunken to seven or eight, continued to rule the colony, 
admitting a few new freemen, now and then, to a shadowy 
citizenship. 

The chief founders of New England had a very real dread 
of democracy. John Cotton, the greatest of the clerical 
Excursus : leaders, wrote : — 



the Puritan 

leaders' 

attitude 



"Democracy I do not conceive that God did ever 
toward ordain as a fit government for either church or com- 

democracy monwealth. // the people he governors, who shall he 
governed ? As for monarchy and aristocracy, they are both clearly 
approved and directed in the Scriptures. . . ." 

And the great Winthrop always refers to democracy with 
aversion. He asserts that it has "no warrant in Scripture," 
and that "among nations it has always been accounted the 
meanest and worst of all forms of government." At best, 
Winthrop and his friends believed in what they called "a 
mixt aristocracy": the people {above the condition of day 
laborers) might choose their rulers — provided they chose 
from still more select classes ; but the rulers so chosen were 
to possess practically absolute power, oivning their offices 
as an ordinary man owned his farm. 

Calvin, the master of Puritan political thought, teaches 
that to resist even a bad magistrate is "to resist God." 
His language is followed closely by Winthrop. In 1639, 
lifter the people in Massachusetts had secured a little 
power, the magistrates tricked them out of most of it for 
a while by a law decreasing the number of deputies, so that 
they should not outvote the aristocratic magistrates in the 
Court. Some of the people petitioned modestly for the 
repeal of this law. Winthrop looked upon the petition as 
"tending to sedition." Said he, "When the people have 
chosen men, to be their rulers, now to combine together . . . 
in a public petition to have an order repealed . . . savors 
of resisting an ordinance of God. For the people, having 
deputed others, have no power to make or alter laws them- 



THE WATERTOWN PROTEST, 1G3> 77 

selves, but are to be subject.'' ^ The great founders of 
America were far from believing in government "0/ the 
people and by the people." 

The first protest against this oligarchic usurpation came, 
after good English precedent, upon a matter of taxation. 
In February, 163*2, the Assistants voted a tax ^j^^ water- 
for fortifications. Watertown was called upon town Pro- 
to pay eight pounds. The Watertown minister *®^*' ^®^^ 
then called the people together and secured a resolution 
"that it was not safe to pay moneys after that sort, for 
fear of bringing themselves and posterity into bondage." 
Governor Winthrop at once summoned the men of Water- 
town before him at Boston as culprits, rebuked them for 
their "error," and so overawed them that they "made a 
retraction and submission . . . and so their offence was 
pardoned." Probably, however, on the walk back to 
Watertown through the winter night, the "error" revived. 
Certainly, during the next months, there was secret demo- 
cratic plotting and sending to and fro among the towns of 
which we have no record. (Our information comes almost 
wholly from the brief Colonial Records and from Win- 
throp. The democrats never wrote their story.) At all 
events, a week before the next General Court met in May, 
Winthrop warned the Assistants "that he had heard the 
people intended ... to desire [vote] that the Assistants 
might be chosen anew every year, and that the governor 
might be chosen by the whole court, and not by the Assist- 
ants only." These were charter provisions, of which the 
freemen must have heard some rumor. "Upon this," 
adds Winthrop's JournaL "Mr. Ludlow [an Assistant] 
grew into a passion and said that then we should pij-g^ g^jn 
have no government, but there would be an in- for the 
terim wherein every man might do what he ^^°"^^y 
pleased." In spite of such silly passion, when the General 

^ The quotations from Winthrop come from his History of New England. This 
has been printed only with modernized spelHng. When a Winthrop quotation 
is given with antique spelHng, it comes from his Letters. 



78 EARLY MASSACHUSETTS 

Court met, the freemen calmly took hack into their oimi hands 
the annual election of governor and of Assistants. Then they 
went further, and sanctioned the Watertown protest by de- 
creeing that each town should choose two representatives to 
act with the magistrates in matters of taxation. 

This was not yet representative government. The new 
deputies acted in taxation only : the magistrates kept their 
usurped power to make laws. True, the magistrates now 
had to come up for reelection each year, but this was little 
more than a polite form. No chance was given to nominate 
two candidates for a position, and then to choose between 
them. The Secretary of the Assistants made nominations — 
in some such form as, — "Mr. Ludlow's term as Assistant 
has expired ; will you have him to be an Assistant again .^" 
On this sort of nomination the people had to vote Yes or No, 
by erection of hands. Unless they first rejected an old 
ofiicer, there was no chance to elect a new one. 

In spite of such drawbacks, the reform of 1632 was a 
democratic advance. Two years later came the second 
step, the 'peaceful revolution of IGSJf.. 

This movement began as a protest against "special 
privilege." The Assistants had made laws to favor their 
own class — trying repeatedly to keep wages 
ing against down to the old Icvcl of England, and order- 
class jjjg ili^i swine found in grain fields might be 
killed. Winthrop speaks often of the high cost 
of food and other necessities, as compared with English 
prices ; but he was honestly dismayed that carpenters should 
ask more than the old English wage. Indeed he puts the 
cart before the horse, and blames the higher cost of living 
upon the rise in wages, quite in twentieth century style. 
As to the swine law, — the poor man wanted his pig to find 
part of its living in the woods, but the rich men were not will- 
ing to fence their large fields. This matter caused harder 
feeling even than the wage laws. 

The common freemen determined to stop some of this 
"class legislation." In April, 1634, Governor Winthrop 



REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT, 1634 



79 



sent out the usual notice calling all freemen to a General 
Court in May. Soon after, on a given day, two men from 
each of the eight towns met at Boston. How the meeting 
was arranged and the "committees" chosen, we have no 
record ; but again tliere nmst have been much democratic 
planning, and many a journey through the forest, to secure 
this "first political convention in America." 

The "convention" asked to see the charter. After read- 
ing it, they called Winthrop's attention to the fact that 

the making of laws introduction 
belonged properly to °* Repre- 

,, 1111 p sentative 

the whole body ot government, 

freemen (now some ^®^* 
200), instead of to the nine As- 
sistants. Winthrop told them 
loftily that the freemen did not 
have men among them "quali- 
fied for such a business." He 
suggested, however, that per- 
haps they might once a year 
choose a committee to viake 
suggestions to the Assistants. 
The good governor felt sure — - 
as his "Journal" shows — that 
this condescension had quieted 
the trouble. But when the 
General Court met {May 14), three deputies appeared from 
each of the eight toions, to sit with the Assistants, not merely 
to suggest laws, but to make them. Representative govern- 
ment had begun. 

The aristocrats had had warning that their power was in 
danger, and they put forward their leading clerical champion. 
John Cotton preached the usual sermon to open the Court, — 

^ Cotton could use sophistry on occasion in masterly fashion — as when he 
argued against free speech for certain dissenters, that [since they differed from 
him] they must " sin against conscience, and so it could not be against conscience 
to restrain them." Winthrop tells a delicious story — without any suspicion of 
its flavor to us — of the admission of Cotton's wife to the Boston Church. Church 
membership in England was no longer accepted, but a new confession of faith 




John Cotton. ^ From the engrav- 
ing after a portrait, in Drake's 
History and Antiquities of Boston. 



80 EARLY MASSACHUSETTS 

"and delivered this doctrine, that a magistrate ought not to 
be turned into the condition of a private man without just 
cause [and after a formal trial], no more than the magistrate 
may not turn a private man out of his freehold, etc., with- 
out like public trial." This was a claim that public office 
was private aristocratic property. (At another time Win- 
throp tells, with approval, how Cotton "showed from the 
Word of God that the magistracy ought to be for life.") 
The answer of the freemen was to demand a ballot, instead 
of the usual "erection of hands," in choosing a governor. 
Then they dropped Winthrop from the office he had held 
for four years,'^ and fined some of the Assistants for illegal 
abuse of power. They also ordered jury trial for all im- 
portant criminal cases, and admitted 81 new freemen ivhom 
the Assistants the day before had refused to admit. 

The Court then made the revolution permanent. It decreed 
that every General Court in future should consist (like 
this one) of deputies chosen by the several towns and of 
the governor and Assistants. Only such Courts could admit 
freemen, lay taxes, or make laws. The May Court each 
year was also to be a Court of Elections: at the opening of 
this Court, all freemen might be present, to choose governor 
and Assistants. For the most part, the old rulers took 
these changes in good part, quite in English temper ; and the 
generous Winthrop, after recording his defeat, adds magnan- 
imously, — "This Court made many good orders." 

Arepresen- Massachusetts had now grown from a narrow 
aristocracy oligarchy into a representative aristocracy. It was 

was required. Cotton made a lengthy and eloquent statement for himself, and 
then " desired the elders to question Mistress Cotton in private, and that she 
might not be required to give testimony in public, which was against the Apostle's 
rule and woman's modesty " ; and, this being agreed to, he himself then "gave 
a modest testimony of her." 

^ The aristocratic doctrine of Cotton was further rebuked by the election of 
a new governor for each of the two following years. Then, in a period of great 
trouble, the trusted Winthrop was chosen again, and kept in office by annual elec- 
tions, except for five years, until his death in 1649. Even in 1G34. Winthrop 
was chosen to the Board of Assistants ; but Ludlow (page 77) was dropped alto- 
gether from the magistracy — the first action of that sort in the colony. 



SOCIAL RANKS 81 

still far short of a democracy. There was even more aris- 
tocracy in society than in politics. The people were divided 
into five distinct classes : — 

gentlemen, who alone had the title Master (Mr.) ; 

skilled artisans and freeholders, the backbone of the 
colony, usually addressed as "Goodman Brown" or "Good- 
man Jones" ; 

unskilled laborers, for whose names no handle was needed, 
and for whom indeed the surname was not often used ; 

servants, who usually passed finally into the class of artisans 
or laborers ; 

slaves, of whom there were soon a small number, both 
Negro and Indian. 

Gentlemen were set apart from the lower orders almost 
as distinctly as Lords in England were from gentlemen. 
In earlv Massachusetts, one family out of four- „ 

, % , . . "^ T^ ,. Special 

teen belonged to this aristocracy, lor ordinary privileges 
"people" to show subordination to these social of " gentie- 

. , . , , . men 

superiors was about as essential as to obey written 
law. And the law expressly gave some privileges to the 
aristocracy. For instance, in 1631, Mr. Josias Plaistowe 
was convicted of stealing corn from the Indians. His 
servants — who had assisted, under orders — were con- 
demned to be flogged ; l)ut the court merely fined Plaistowe 
and ordered that thenceforward he should be called "by 
the name of Josias, and not Mr., as formerlie." This 
was severe punishment, equivalent to degrading an officer 
to the ranks. For another offense, Josias would no doubt 
be whipped, like an ordinary man. The aristocracy were 
always e.veinpt from corporal punishment by custom ; and 
in 1641 this exemption was put into written law. Ten 
years later the court declared its "utter detestation . . . 
that men or weomen of meane condition should take uppon 
them the garbe of gentlemen by wearing gold or silver lace 
or buttons . . . or to walk in great bootes, or woemen of 
the same rancke to weare silke or tiffany hoodes," and then 
proceeded to impose a fine of "tenn shillings for every such 
offense." 



82 EARLY MASSACHUSETTS 

The franchise, too, was far from democratic. The voting 
"freemen" were a small part of the free men. The General 
The Court of 1631, which admitted the first new free- 

franchise men, ordered that thereafter only church members 
should be made freemen. This did not mean that all church 
members could vote : it meant that voters were to be selected 
only from church members. Unskilled laborers, servants, 
even slaves, were admitted to the churches, but never to full 
citizenship. Only about one man out of four could vote at 
any time in colonial Massachusetts. 

III. DEVELOPMENT OF POLITICAL MACHINERY 

The Court of 1634 voted by ballot when it unseated 

Winthrop. We know this fact from the note, "chosen by 

papers," in the margin of Winthrop's manuscript, 

liticai use Opposite the name of the new governor. "Papers " 

of the ballot ^cre used as an aid to the democratic faction. A 

in America , p i • 

secret vote protected the voters irom being over- 
awed by Winthrop's influential friends. 

This was the first political use of the ballot in America, 
though "papers" had been used once before in a church 
election at Salem. This method of voting, though not in 
use for parliamentary elections, was common in boroughs 
and in large business corporations in England.^ One of 
these business corporations had now become a political 
corporation in Massachusetts ; and nothing could be more 
natural than for it to make use of the ballot as soon as 
serious differences of opinion arose. 

After 163.5, law required the Court of Elections to use 
papers in choosing governor and Assistants. For governor 
Evolution of cacli votcr wrotc upon his ballot the name of his 
the ballot choice, or found some one to write it for him. But 
for some time the Assistants were chosen one at a time much 
in the old way. The Secretary nominated one of those al- 
ready in office. Then the people deposited their ballots. 

' See page 3G for reference to the ballot in elections of the London Company. 
The "rules" of that body ordered that its elections should be by ballot. 



EVOLUTION OF THE BALLOT 83 

Those in favor of the nomination marked their papers with 
a scroll or cross — which did not call for ability to write ; those 
opposed voted blank ballots. In 1643 the law ordered that 
kernels of corn should be used instead of paper ballots, — ■ 
white kernels to signify election ; and other colors, rejection. 
If the candidate were defeated, another nomination was 
made for his place, to be accepted or rejected in like manner. 
There was no opportunity, so far, to choose behveen two 
candidates, and the man in oflSce still had a tremendous 
advantage. 

The next step was to introduce tlie ballot in town elections. 
This was done first at Boston, in December, 1634, when a 
committee was chosen to divide public lands among the 
inhabitants. The people, says Winthrop, "feared that the 
richer men would give the poorer sort no great proportions 
of land," and this time, too, they used the ballot to leave out 
the aristocratic element. 

In all these cases the advantage of the ballot lay in its 
secrecy. But there is another way in which the ballot aids 
democracy. Its use makes it possible for men to vote in 
their own towns, in small election districts instead of being 
required all to come to one central point. Such an arrange- 
ment permits more voters to take part in elections. Soon 
the men of Massachusetts used the ballot for this purpose. 
In March, 1636, the General Court ordered that the freemen 
of six new outlying towns might send "proxies" to the next 
Court of Elections. During the next December, the 
governor resigned, and a special election was called. "In 
regard of the season," any freemen were authorized "to 
send their votes in writing." And the next spring (March, 
1637) this method of voting for governor and x\ssistants was 
made permanent. Out of the use of proxies a true ballot in 
the several towns had developed. 

When men came to elect the governor and Assistants in 
the several towns, as just described, instead of all coming to 
Boston for the purpose, it was necessary, of course. Nominations 
to know in advance from what names the choice was ^°^ °^'^^ 
to be made. The old system of nomination broke down ; 



84 



EARLY MASSACHUSETTS 



and the colony began to make use, sometimes of ^''primary 
elections,'''' sometimes of crude ''nominating conventions''' made 
up of delegates from the various towns. 




Evolution 
of the 
judicial 
system 



Colonial Fireplace and Utensils, "Broad Hearth," Saugus. The house, 
built in 1646, was the home of the first iron founder in America, whose works 
were near by. Cf. page 72. 

Judicial development kept pace with political growth. In 
the first summer in Massachusetts, a man was found dead 
under suspicious circumstances. The magistrates 
appointed a body of sworn men to investigate. 
This coroner's jury accused a certain Palmer of 
murder. Palmer was then tried by a trial jury 
{petit jury) of twelve men. All this was in accord with 
custom in England. No Massachusetts law upon the matter 
had been passed. 

In 1634, however, the General Court did expressly estab- 
lish trial by jury, and a year later it ordered that a jury of 
inquest (grand jury) should meet twice a year, to present 
to the court all offenders against law and public welfare. 
Thus the first five years saw the complete adoption of the 



THE "BODY OF LIBERTIES" 85 

English jury system. It is said sometimes — with much 
exaggeration — that in the absence of written law, the 
Puritans followed the Jewish law. But in this supremely 
important matter of legal machinery, they turned promptly 
not to the Old Testament but to the English Common Law. 

At the General Court in May, 1635, the deputies de- 
manded a written code of law. The magistrates were making 
law, almost at will, in their decisions, after cases xhe demand 
came before them; and "the people thought their for written 
condition very unsafe," says Winthrop, "while *^ 
so much power rested in the discretion of the magistrates.'* 
The democratic demand could not very well be openly 



o\^n- ■^^' •<^' -^,ri'/ ij^"^"^" "^ ^' '^^" 






Number 1 of the "Body of Liberties." The original manuscript is now in the 

Boston Athenaeum. 

denied; but for a time it was evaded skillfully. The 
Court appointed four magistrates to prepare a code ; hut 
this committee failed to report. A second committee of 
"gentlemen" was equally ineffective. Then, in 1638, the 
Court ordered that the deputies should collect suggestions 
from the freemen of their several towns, and present them 
in writing to a new committee made up partly of deputies. 

Now matters began to move. The suggestions from the 
towns were reduced to form in 1639, and sent back for further 
consideration, "that the freemen might ripen their thought," 
and make further suggestion. The next lot of returns were 



86 EARLY MASSACHUSETTS 

referred to two clergymen, John Cotton and Nathaniel Ward. 
On this basis, in 1641, each of these gentlemen presented a 
full code to the General Court, and the more democratic 
.pj^g one, by Ward, was adopted. This famous Body of 

"Body of Liberties marks splendid progress in law, English or 
1 erties American. Especially notable are (1) the provision 
that no punishment should be inflicted merely at the discre- 
tion of magistrates but only by virtue of some express law of 
the colony ; ('2) prohibition of monopolies ; (3) right of jury 
trial with right of "challenge" ; and (4) the curiously interest- 
ing legislation under the headings "Liberties of Women" and 
"Liberties of Children." Much in advance of English Com- 
mon Law practice was the order, — "Everie marry ed 
woeman shall be free from bodilie correction or stripes by 
her husband," — although there was added the prudent 
afterthought, " unless it be in his owne defence upon her 
assalt." 

The next important fruit of the democratic movement was 
the division of the legislature into two Houses. For ten years 
Evolution of ^^^ter the "revolution of 1634," the General Court 
a two-House sat as oue body. But it was made up of two dis- 
egis ature i\^^qi "orders." The deputies were chosen each by 
his own townsfolk, and held office for only a few days. Often 
they were artisans or farmers, and as a whole they leaned to 
democracy. The Assistants continued to be intensely 
aristocratic. They had many additional meetings for 
judicial business and to aid the governor. They had to 
know some law, and they served without pay. Only 
"gentlemen" were qualified for the office, or could afford 
to hold it. More yet to the point — the hottest democrat 
did not dream of selecting these "ruling magistrates" from 
any but the highest of the gentry class. 

Naturally, friction between the two orders was incessant. 
At the first clash, in the summer Court of 1634, the Assistants 
claimed "a negative voice,"" or veto. To grant this was to 
give as much voting power to the aristocratic minority as 
to the democratic majority. But the ministers were 



THE FIRST TWO-HOUSE LEGISLATURE 87 

brought forward to argue for the plan, and finally it was 
agreed to. 

During this controversy, a pamphlet by Israel Stougliton, 
of Dorchester, attacked the claim of the Assistants — - with 
what Winthrop calls "many weak arguments." 
The Assistants called Stoughton before them, Aristocrats 
forced him to recant, ordered his book burned, de- suppress 
prived him of his office (of deputy), and forbade 
him to hold any office for three years ! The great Puritan 
leaders had no more place for free speech than for the 
right of petition. Thanks to English custom, debate in the 
General Court was free. Stoughton could have spoken his 
arguments there with impunity. But the Assistants denied 
the right of a citizen, outside the legislature, to criticize the 
government. Winthrop had written a pamphlet, " with 
many weak arguments " certainly, in favor of the "negative 
voice"; but the Assistants saw no wrong in argument on 
that side. 

The Assistants had now won much the greater weight in 
the legislature. They were a small disciplined body. They 
could agree upon plans before the Court met, and could 
act as a unit in the meeting, much better than could the 
deputies. Moreover the Assistants monopolized debate : it 
was impossible for individual deputies to confront men of 
such social superiority and such political ability. The 
deputies saw that they would gain dignity and influence if 
they sat by themselves; and, in 16.!f'i, the General Court 
separated into two "Houses." Thereafter, each "order" 
had its own officers and committees, and managed its own 
debates. This was the first two-House legislature in 
America. The immediate occasion for the di- Mrs. Sher- 
vision was a quaint three-year dispute over a mans pig 
poor woman's pig, which had strayed into the ^[ctcfry to 
pen of a rich gentleman and had been slaughtered, the demo- 
Says Winthrop, — " There fell out a great matter 
upon a small occasion." Three lawsuits regarding this 
pig had come up to the General Court. Each time the 
deputies had sided with the woman, the Assistants with 



88 EARLY MASSACHUSETTS 

the " gentleman." The irritation on both sides hastened 
the separation of the legishiture into distinct chambers. 
But such a move had already been considered, and the real 
cause lay in the class jealousy that we have been tracing. 
When Assistants and deputies could no longer live in peace 
under one roof, the example of the two-House parliament in 
England suggested a convenient remedy. 

IV. LOCAL GOVERNMENT IN NEW ENGLAND 

Town meetings are to liberty what primary schools are to science. 

ToCQUEVILLE. 

Most New England towns in the seventeenth century 
were merely agricultural villages. Farmers did not live 
A New scattered through the country, as now, each on 

England his own farm. They dwelt together, European 
"^ *^® fashion, in villages of thirty or a hundred or two 

hundred householders, with their fields stretching off on all 
sides. 

At first, in Massachusetts, the General Court appointed 
justices and constables for each settlement, and tried to attend 
And the ^^ other local business. But from the first, too, 
General 0)1 spccial occasions, the people of a town met to 
° discuss matters of interest, — as at the famous 

Watertown meeting of 1632. Such gatherings were called 
Evolution ^y ^ minister or other leading man, and were 
of town sometimes held just before the people dispersed 

mee ngs from the Thursday "sermon" (the ancestor of our 
midweek "prayer meeting"). The first Boston meeting 
that we know of was held at such a time — to choose a com- 
mittee to divide the town lands (page 83 above). 

Then in 1633 Dorchester ordered that there should be a 
regular monthly town meeting to settle town matters. Water- 
Dorchester town followed this example the next spring ; and 
and soon each town, old or new, fell into line. Each 

own i^Q^yjj^ ^QQ^ chose a town clerk to keep records of 
the "by-laws" passed at the meetings, and elected a com- 
mittee ("the seven men," "the nine men," "the selected 



TOWN MEETING AND SELECTMEN 89 

townsmen," "the Select Men") with vague authority to 
manage town affairs between the town meetings. 

These governments by town meeting and Selectmen grew 
up out of the needs of the people, and out of their desire to 
manage their own affairs. Soon the General Court gave 
legal sanction to the system. After that, in theory, the 
towns possessed only such authority as the central govern- 
ment of the commonwealth delegated to them. The central 
legislature gave the town its territory and its name, and re- 
quired it to maintain trainband, school, roads, and certain 
police arrangements, and sometimes imposed fines when a 
town failed in any of these things to come up to the standard 
set by law. 

In actual practice, however, great independence was left 
the town. The town meeting appointed all local officers, — 
not merely selectmen and clerk, but school trustees. Local self- 
hog reeve, fence viewer, constable, treasurer, pound government 
keeper, sealer of weights and measures,- measurer of corn and 
lumber, overseer of chimneys, overseer of the village alms- 
house ; and for most of these officers it alone defined all 
powers and duties. It divided the town lands among the in- 
habitants, — such a part as it chose to divide, — and it fixed 
the size of building lots, — a quarter-acre, an acre, two acres, 
or five. It passed ordinances regarding the remaining town 
fields and pastures, the keeping up of fences, the running 
of cattle and hogs, the term of the school and its support, 
the support of the church, and of the town poor. 

This town democracy had its disadvantages. Action 
was slow, and was often hindered by ignorance and petty 
neighborhood jealousies. But the best thing about the 
town meeting was the constant training in politics it gave 
to the mass of the people. Thomas Jefferson called it 
*'the best school of political liberty the world ever saiv." 

All the people in a town could come to town meeting and 
could speak there ; but not all could vote. At classes of 
the base of society in every town was a class of the town 
"cottagers," or squatters, who were permitted to p°p"^'°" 
live in the place " at the town's courtesy only," and who 



90 EARLY MASSACHUSETTS 

could not acquire land there, or claim any legal right to the 
use of the town ''commons" for pasture. Servants whose 
term of service was up, and strangers who drifted into the 
town as day laborers, usually passed at first into this class. 
The people in a town who held full town citizenship were 
known as "inhabitants." A "cottager," however worthy, 
or a new settler of even the gentry class, could be "admitted 
inhabitant" only by vote of the town ; but in practice, the 
"inhabitants" of a town included all its gentlemen and 
industrious artisans and freeholders, — many of whom 
never secured the colonial franchise. Thus the town gov- 
ernment in Massachusetts was more democratic than the 
central government. The body of citizens was more ex- 
tensive, and the citizens acted directly, not through repre- 
sentatives. And this town democracy touched the life of 
the people at more points, and at more vital ones, than did 
the central government. 

V. AN ATTEMPT AT AN ARISTOCRATIC THEOCRACY 

In England the High-churchmen had reproached the 
Low-churchmen with secretly being Separatists. The Low- 
The Massa- cliurch Puritans repelled the charge indignantly, 
chusetts and, to prove their good faith, joined vehemently 
and the in denouncing the Separatists. Thomas Hooker 
Separatists ^rjg Q^ie of the greatest of the Puritan clergy. 
Before he came to America, while a fugitive in Holland, 
he was called a Separatist. But he claimed to have "an 
extreme aversion" to that sect, and he wrote, "To separate 
from the faithful assemblies and churches in England, as no 
churches, is an error in judgment and a sin in practice." 
So, too, Francis Higginson (page 63) exclaimed, as the 
shores of England receded from view, "We will not say, as the 
Separatists are icont to say. Farewell, Rome ! Farewell, Baby- 
lon ! But we will say, Farewell, dear England ; Farewell, the 
Church of God in England, and all Christian friends there." 

But even Hooker's vehement protest left a loophole — 
not uncharacteristic of much Puritan sophistry — in his 



ATTEMPT AT ARISTOCRATIC THEOCRACY 91 

cautious injection of the word " faithful." And when 
the Massachusetts Puritans reached the New World they 
found themselves more in accord with the despised Sepa- 
ratists than they had thought. Much of the change seems 
to have come on the Atlantic, — where the eight or 
ten weeks' voyage, and the daily preaching, invited men 
to find out just where they did stand. At all events, 
very soon they did separate wholly from the English Church, 
refusing even to recognize its ordination of clergymen, union of 
On the other hand, they did not separate the church state and 
from the state, as Plymouth did, nor did they make 
one congregation wholly independent of another in matters of 
church government. They wished to use the state to preserve 
their religion and church discipline. Winthrop declared that 
their purpose in coming to America was "to seek out a place 
of cohabitation under a due form of government both civil 
and ecclesiastical.'' To keep this union of state and church 
they adopted three distinct devices : (1) they gave the 
franchise only to church members ; (2) they allowed no 
churches except those approved by the government ; (3) they 
referred many political questions to the clergy assembled in 
synods. 

The Massachusetts ideal loas an aristocratic theocracy, — a 
government by the best, in accordance with the law of God. 
The ministers were supposed to have special ability ^^ ^j.jg. 
to interpret that law. Nor were they back- tocratic 
ward in claiming such rights. Winthrop tells, ^°"^^y 
with approval, how Cotton "proved" from many texts of 
Scripture "that the rulers of the people should consult with 
ministers of the churches upon occasion of any weighty 
matter, though the case should seem never so clear, — as 
David in the case of Ziklag." In practice, the The clergy 
ministers in politics proved a bulwark of class i^i politics 
rule. In every controversy between aristocracy and de- 
mocracy, they found some Biblical passage which would 
support the aristocracy. More than once democratic 
progress depended upon the appearance of a rare democratic 
champion among the ministers, like Ward of Ipswich (page 



92 EARLY MASSACHUSETTS 

86) or Hooker of Connecticut (below). By 1639 the democ- 
racy had learned the lesson, and managed sometimes to put 
forward democratic ministers to preach "election sermons." 

The purpose of the early Massachusetts Puritans (in 
their own words) was "to build a City of God on earth." 
Relation of They Came to the wilderness not so much to 
the Puritan escapc persecution as to find a freer chance to 
religious build as they saw fit, where there should be 
freedom none witli right to hinder them ; and they did 
not mean that intruders should mar their work. This 
plan forbade toleration. Religious freedom ivas no part of the 
Puritan s program. He never claimed that it was. It was 
fundamentally inconsistent with his program. The Puritan 
was trying a lofty experiment, for which he sacrificed home 
and ease ; but he could not try it at all without driving out 
from his "City of the Lord" those who differed from him. 

In the first fall after Winthrop's arrival, two "gentlemen" 
from England came to Massachusetts by way of Plymouth. 
They were introduced by Miles Standish ; "but," says 
Winthrop, "having no testimony [i.e. evidence of religious 
standing], we would not receive them." Probably these 
men were Separatists ; and the government was cautious 
regarding them, because they were "gentlemen," not com- 
mon men without influence. In the following March, the 
Assistants shipped back to England six men at one time, 
without trial, merely upon the ground that they were "un- 
Deporta- mcetc to inhabit here " ; while for years there were 
tions for occasional entries in the records like the following : 
opinions ..jy/j-^ Thomas Makepeace, because of his novile 
disposition, is informed that we are weary of him, unless 
he reform" ; and "John Smith is ordered to remove himself 
from this jurisdiction for divers dangerous opinions which he 
holdeth." These first "deportations " help us to understand 
the more famous expulsions of Roger Williams and Anne 
Hutchinson. 

Roger Williams was one of the most powerful and scholarly 
of the great Puritan clergy. He had rare sweetness of 
temper ; but, along with it, a genius for getting into bitter 



AND ROGER WILLIAMS 93 

controversy. He was broad-minded on great questions ; 
but he could quarrel vehemently over fantastic quibbles. 
The kindly Bradford could not like him and de- Roger 
scribes him as possessing "many precious parts, but wmiams 
very unsettled in judgment"; and again, — "I desire the 
Lord to show him his errors and reduce him into the way 
of truth, and give him a settled judgment and constancy in 
the same ; for I hope he belongs to the Lord." Eggleston 
hits off Williams' weakness well in saying that he "could put 
the questions of grace after meat and of religious freedom 
into the same category." 

Driven from England by Laud, Williams came to Massa- 
chusetts in the supply ship in the winter of 1631. He was 
welcomed warmly by Winthrop as "a godly minister"; 
but it was soon plain that he had adopted the opinions of 
the Separatists. He scolded at all who would not utterly 
renounce fellowship with English churches, and he preached 
against any union of church and state, holding that the 
magistrate had no right to punish for Sabbath-breaking or 
for other offenses against "the first table" (the first four of 
the Commandments). Thus his welcome at Boston quickly 
wore thin. He went to Plymouth for a time, but soon re- 
turned to the larger colony as the pastor of Salem — ^ which, 
more than any other Massachusetts town, inclined to 
Separatism because of its early association with Plymouth 
and some very essential aid given it by that colony in the 
trying winter before the Winthrop migration arrived. 
Just at this time Salem wanted more lands. The court of 
Assistants paid no public attention to the request, but let 
it be known privately that, if Salem expected the grant, it 
had best dismiss Williams. On his part, Williams referred 
to the other churches of the colony as "ulcered and gan- 
grened," and called the clergy "false hirelings." 

An opportunity soon offered to get rid of him. All land 
in America, he urged, belonged to the Indians until bought 
from them. He denied the title of the colony, and said 
that the King had told "a solemn lie" in the charter in 
claiming right to give title. Such words, unrebuked, might 



94 EARLY MASSACHUSETTS 

enbroil the little colony with the home government, with 
which it was already in trouble enough (page 73). The 
magistrates seized the excuse, and ordered Williams back to 
England — where the loss of his ears was the least he could 
expect. If he had been orthodox in religion, the Massachu- 
setts government would surely have found some nominal 
punishment for his overzeal against the Crown — as they 
did for Endicott, who just at this time cut the cross out of 
the English flag, calling it "an idolatrous symbol." 

On account of the bitter winter season, the order against 
Williams was suspended until spring. The magistrates 
seem to have understood that he agreed meantime not to 
teach these troublesome doctrines. He continued to do so, 
however ; and an officer was sent to place him on board 
ship. Forewarned secretly hy Winthrop, he escaped to the 
forest, and found his way to the Narragansett Indians. The 
next spring a few adherents joined him ; and the little band 
founded Providence, the beginning of Rhode Island (1636). 

Williams had few followers, and was easily disposed of. 
The Hutchinson episode divided the colony for a time into 
Anne not unequal parts ; and the majority, to maintain 

Hutchinson their tottering supremacy, resorted to dubious 
political devices. Anne Hutchinson is described by Win- 
throp (who hated her) as a woman of "ready wit and bold 
spirit." She was intellectual, eloquent, and enthusiastic. 
Her real offense seems to have been her keen contempt for 
many of the ministers and her disrespect toward the magis- 
trates ; but she also held religious views somewhat different 
from the prevailing ones. At one time, however, Winthrop 
confessed, "Except men of good understanding, few could 
see where the differences were ; and indeed they seemed so 
small as (if men's affections had not been formerly alienated 
. . .) they might easily have come to a reconcilliation." 
Mrs. Hutchinson spoke much of an "inner light" ; and this 
phrase was twisted into a claim that she enjoyed special 
revelations from the Holy Spirit. For a time Boston sup- 
ported her with great unanimity, but the majority in all the 
other churches was rallied against her. 



AND ANNE HUTCHINSON 95 

Among Mrs. Hutchinson's adherents were the minister 
Wheelwright, and young Harry Vane, governor at the 
time. In the winter of 1637, Wheelwright preached a ser- 
mon declaiming violently against the ministers of the op- 
posing faction. For this the next General Court (in March) 
"questioned" him, and voted him "guilty of sedition," in 
spite of a lengthy petition from Boston for freedom of 
speech. 

The majority adopted also a shrewd maneuver. To 
lessen the influence of heretical Boston, they voted to hold 
the approaching "Court of Elections" not at that town as 
usual, but at Newtown (Cambridge). When that Court 
assembled, in May, "there was great danger of tumult." 
"Those of that side," says Winthrop, "grew into fierce 
speeches, and some laid hands on others ; but seeing them- 
selves too weak, they grew quiet." The orthodox faction 
finally elected Winthrop over Vane, and even dropped three 
magistrates of the other party off the Board of Assistants. 
To prevent the minority from receiving expected reinforce- 
ments from England, it was then decreed that newcomers 
should not settle in the colony, or even tarry there more 
than three weeks, without permission from the government. 
A few weeks later, a brother of Mrs. Hutchinson arrived, 
with many friends ; but Winthrop compelled them to pass 
on at once to the New Hampshire wilderness. 

In the following summer a synod of clergy solemnly con- 
demned the Hutchinson heresies ; and at the General Court 
in November the majority, "finding that two so opposite 
parties could not contain in the same body without hazard 
of ruin to the whole," determined to crush their opponents. 
Mrs. Hutchinson and Wheelwright were banished after a 
farcical trial; and "a fair opportunity" for destroying 
their party was discovered in the petition, nine months old, 
regarding Wheelwright. The three Boston deputies, be- 
cause they had "agreed to the petition," were expelled from 
the Court and banished from the colony. Six other leading 
citizens were disfranchised. The remaining signers, seventy- 
six in number, were disarmed. Fifty-eight of them lived 



96 EARLY MASSACHUSETTS 

in Boston ; the rest, scattered in five other towns. The 
Court pretended to justify this insult by referring to the 
excesses of the Munster Anabaptists of a century earher : 
"Insomuch as there is just cause for suspition that they, 
as others in Germany in former times, may, upon some reve- 
lation, make a suddaine irruption upon those that differ 
with them," runs the preamble of the disarming order, 
with a sly dig at Mrs. Hutchinson's "revelations." 

And now Boston church was brought back into the fold. 
Taking advantage of the temporary absence of twelve more 
of the leaders of the congregation. Cotton and Winthrop 
succeeded in browbeating the cowed and leaderless society 
into excommunicating Mrs. Hutchinson. Says Winthrop, 
after telling the story : "At this time, the good providence of 
God so disposing, divers of the congregation (being the chief 
men of that party, her husband being one) were gone to 
Narragansett to seek out a new place for plantation." 
This assumption of divine help in a political trick is the most 
unlovely sentence Winthrop ever penned. 

In all this persecution the Massachusetts Puritans were 
not behind their age : they merely were not in advance in 
The age and ^^^^ respect. In England the Puritan Long Parlia- 
reiigious mcut in 1641, demanding reform in the church, 
om protested that it did not favor toleration: "We 
do declare it is far from our purpose to let loose the golden 
reins of discipline and government in the church, to leave 
private persons or particular congregations to take up what 
form of divine service they please. For we hold it requisite 
that there should be throughout the whole realm a con- 
formity to that order which the laws enjoin." 

On the other hand, a few far-seeing men did reach to 
loftier vision. In that same year. Lord Brooke wrote nobly 
in a treatise on religion: "The individual should have 
liberty. No power on earth should force his practice. One 
that doubts with reason and humility may not, for aught I 
see, be forced by violence. . . . Fire and water may be 
restrained ; but light cannot. It will in at every cranny. 



AND RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION 97 

Now to stint it is [to-morrow] to resist an enlightened and 
inflamed multitude. . . . Can we not dissent in judgment, 
but we must also disagree in affection?" In America 
Roger Williams caught this truth clearly, and made it the 
foundation principle of Rhode Island. So, too, Sir Richard 
Saltonstal, one of the leaders of the 1630 migration. Sal- 
tonstal's company settled Watertown, which from the first 
was inclined not only to democracy in politics but to "sep- 
aratism" in religion. (Indeed it seems probable that re- 
sentment by the town at certain interference by the magis- 
trates with their pastor was back of the famous Watertown 
Protest regarding taxation ; page 77.) Saltonstal remained 
in the colony less than two years. Nearly twenty years 
later (1650) he wrote from England to leading Massachu- 
setts clergy a touching protest against religious persecution. 

"Reverened and deare friends, whom I unfaynedly love and re- 
spect : It doth not a little grieve my spirit to heare what sadd 
things are reported dayly of your tyranny and persecutions in 
New England — as that you fyne, whip, and imprison men for 
their consciences. . . . Truely, friends, this your practice of 
compelling any in matters of worship to do that whereof they 
are not fully persuaded, is to make them sin . . . and many are 
made hypocrites thereby. . . . We . . . wish you prosperity 
every way [and pray] that the Lord would give you meeke and 
humble spirits, not to stryve soe much for uniformity as to keepe 
the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace. ... I hope you 
do not assume to yourselves infallibilitie of judgment, when the 
most learned of the Apostles confesseth he knew but in parte. . . ."^ 

' This extract does very imperfect justice to the fine and tender charity of 
Saltonstal's long letter. With the answer (a masterpiece of Puritan sophistry) 
the document is printed in Hutchinson's Collection of Original Papers, whence both 
letters are reproduced in West's Source Book in American History. 

The Lord Brooke quoted above planned at one time, with his friend, Lord 
Say, to settle in Massachusetts. In the interesting negotiations (Source Book), 
the Reverend John Cotton explains to the Lords that in Massachusetts the 
General Court must soon divide into two Houses, representing the two "Orders" 
of "gentlemen" and "freeholders." (This was in 1636! cf. pages 87-88.) At a 
later time these same two noblemen tried to establish a colony in the Connecti- 
cut valley, where Saybrooke was named for them. 



CHAPTER V 

OTHER NEW ENGLAND COLONIES 

By 1640 there were five colonies in New England, besides 
Plymouth and Massachusetts. English proprietors had 
founded fishing stations on the coasts of Maine and New 
Hampshire, and these settlements had been reinforced and 
Puritanized by Hutchinson sympathizers from Massachu- 
setts. The New Haven group of towns began with a Puritan 
migration from England in 1638. This colony closely re- 
sembled Massachusetts ; but it had a little less aristocracy, 
and depended a little more on the Old Testament as a guide 
in government. 

The two remaining colonies, Rhode Island and Connecticut, 
represented new ideas and played new parts in history. 
Each was born of rebellion against one part of the Massachu- 
setts ideal : Rhode Island, against theocracy ; Connecticut, 
against aristocracy. In the long run the great Massachu- 
setts plan of aristocratic theocracy broke down ; while these 
two little protesting colonies laid broad and deep the foun- 
dations of America. Roger Williams in Rhode Island was 
the apostle of modern religious liberty ; and Thomas Hooker 
in Connecticut was the apostle of modern democracy. 

RHODE ISLAND 

Williams founded the town of Providence in the spring 
of 1636 (page 94). From the Indians he bought a tract of 
Emphasis land, and deeded it in joint ownership to twelve 
on freedom companions "and to such others as the major 
in religion ^^^^ ^^ ^^ shall admit into the same fellowship." 
Later comers signed an agreement to submit themselves 
"only in civil things " to orders made for the public good 

98 



RHODE ISLAND 



99 



by the town fellowship, — in which they were freely granted 
an equal voice, "Civil" in this passage is used in its 
common English sense in that day, as opposed to "eccle- 
siastical." The point to the agreement is that the people 
did 7iot purpose to let the government meddle with religion. 




100 RHODE ISLAND 

Williams' opinion upon the possibility of maintaining civil 
order without compelling uniformity in religion is set forth 
admirably in his figure of speech, comparing a state to a ship, 
where all, passengers and seamen, must obey the captain in 
matters of navigation, though all need not attend the ship's 
prayers. 

No opportunity was lost to assert this doctrine. In 1644 
Williams secured from the Long Parliament a "Patent" 
authorizing the Rhode Island settlements to rule them- 
selves "by such a form of civill government," and to make 
"such civill laws and consitutions " as the majority might 
prefer. Then, in 1663, when the colony received its first 
royal charter, the fundamental idea was made yet more 
explicit : — 

"Whereas it is much on their hearts." says a preamble, quoting 
the petition of the colonists, "to hold forth a livelie experiment 
that a most flourishing civill state may stand . . . with a full 
libertie in religious concernments," accordingly, "noe person 
within the sayd colonye, at any tyme hereafter, shall bee any wise 
molested, punished, disquieted, or called in question, for any 
differences in opinione in matters of religion, and [i.e. provided 
he] doe not actually disturb the civill peace." 

The practice of the colony, too, kept to this high level. 
During the Commonwealth in England, Massachusetts 
Rhode complained that Rhode Island sheltered Quak- 

Isiand and ers, who tlicu swamicd across her borders to 
the Quakers g^^^^y j^^j. neighbors. Williams disliked Quakers 
heartily ; but he now replied that they ought to be punished 
only when they had actually disturbed the peace, and not 
merely for being Quakers. "We have no law," ran this 
noble argument, "to punish any for declaring by words their 
minds concerning the ways and things of God." Massachu- 
setts threatened interference. The smaller colony appealed 
to England, praying — "Whatever fortune may befall us, let 
us not be compelled to exercise power over men's con- 
sciences." In Rhode Island, religious freedom was not a 
mere means to timorous toleration. The chief purpose of 



CONNECTICUT 101 

this social "experiment" was to prove that such freedom 
was compatible with orderly government and good morals. 
For a time there was much turbulence in the colony. Prov- 
idence became a "crank's paradise," "New England's 
dumping ground for the disorderly and eccentric elements of 
her population." But with clear-eyed faith Williams and 
his friends persisted, and finally worked out successfully 
their "livelie experiment." 

CONNECTICUT 

The birthplace of American democracy is Hartford. — Johnston. 

Three Massachusetts towns had been foremost in the 
struggle against aristocracy, — Watertown, Dorchester, and 
Newtown. In 1635-1636, the people of these „,. . , 

. 1 r ^ Withdrawal 

towns made a new migration to the Connecticut of demo- 
valley, to try their own experiment of a demo- ^^*'*^ 
cratic state. Other motives had part in the move- chusetts 
ment, — among them, a desire for the more fertile *?*°^ *° 
land of the valley. The journey through the 
forests, with women and children, herds, and household 
goods, was the first of the overland pilgrimages which were 
to become so characteristic of American life. 

The inspirer of this movement ivas Thomas Hooker, pastor 
of Newtown. Hooker became to Connecticut even more 
than Cotton to Massachusetts. These two great Thomas 
leaders were widely different in their lives and feel- Hooker 
ings. Cotton belonged to the aristocratic English gentry. 
Hooker's father was a yeoman. He himself had been a 
menial "sizar" at Cambridge University, and his wife had 
been a ladies' maid. By birth and association, as well as 
by conviction, he was a man of the people. 

Over against the aristocratic doctrines of the great Massa- 
chusetts leaders, Hooker stated admirably the case for 
democracy. Winthrop wrote to him that democracy was 
"unwarrantable" because "the best part is always the 
least, and of that best part the wiser part is always the 
lesser"; but Hooker replied: "In matters . . . that con- 



102 CONNECTICUT 

cern the common good, a general council chosen by all, to 
transact business which concerns all, I conceive . . . most 
suitable to rule and most safe for the relief of the whole." 
Winthrop and Cotton taught that the magistrates' authority 
had divine sanction. Hooker preached a great political 
sermon to teach that (1) "the foundation of authority is 
laid in the consent of the governed' ' ; (2) "the choice of mag- 
istrates belongs to the people"; and (3) "those who have 
power to appoint officers, have also the right to set bounds 
to their authority." 

For a time the three Connecticut towns kept their Massa- 
chusetts names. Later, they were known as Hartford, 
Wethersfield, and Windsor. At first they recognized a 
vague authority in commissioners appointed over them by 
Massachusetts ; but each town managed freely its own 
local affairs, and, in 1639, an independent central govern- 
„ „ , ment was provided bv a mass meeting of the 

The Funda- . , , . pi i " mi • i • i i 

mental mliabitants ot the colony. 1 his gathermg adopted 

ibm'^^ a set of eleven ''Fundamental Orders" — "the 

first written constitution" in the modern sense. 
The document set up a plan of government similar to that 
which had been worked out in Massachusetts, emphasizing, 
however, all democratic features found there and adding a 
few of its own. 

The governor held office for one year only, and he could 
not serve tioo terms in succession . He had no veto, and in two 
other respects he lacked authority usually possessed by an 
English executive: (1) the General Court could not be dis- 
solved except by its own vote; and (2) it could be elected and 
brought together, on occasion, without the governor s summons. 
The right of the General Court is expressly asserted to "call 
into question" magistrate or governor, and even (in modern 
phrase) to "recall" them during their short term of office. 
The franchise was never restricted to church members, 
as in Massachusetts. At first, anyone whom a town al- 
lowed to vote in town meeting could vote also in the General 
Court of Elections. That is, the toivns fixed not only the 
local, but also the general franchise. But in 1659 the General 



BIRTHPLACE OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 



103 



Court ordered that thereafter no one should vote for gover- 
nor or for members of the General Court unless he were 
possessed of thirty pounds' worth of property, real or per- 
sonal. Even in democratic Connecticut this property 
qualification stood, with slight change, until long after the 
American Revolution. 




An Old Grist Mill at New London, Connecticut, built in 1645. Cf. page 72. 

Connecticut did not reject theocracy. Hooker believed in 
a Bible commonwealth as zealously as Cotton did, though 
he understood his Bible differently on political Connecticut 
matters. The governor had to be a member of and 
a church ; the preamble of the Orders states the *^®°<=''*'^y 
first purpose of the government to be the maintaining of "the 
discipline of the churches, which according to the truth of the 
gospell is now practiced amongst us" ; and the first code of 
laws, in 1650, authorizes the government "to see [that] the 
force, ordinances, and rules of Christe bee observed in every 



104 THE NEW ENGLAND CONFEDERATION 

Church according to his word." The General Court placed 
ministers, defined their powers, and even decided who should 
be admitted to the sacraments. 



THE NEW ENGLAND CONFEDERATION 

The Neiv England colonies had hardly established them- 
selves in the wilderness before they began a movement toward 
The need federal union. The Connecticut valley was claimed 
of union \yy i]^Q Dutch New Netherlands. Moreover, the 
English settlers in the valley found themselves at once in- 
volved in war with the Pequod Indians. Connecticut felt 
keenly the need of protection by the other English colonies ; 
and, in 16.37, Hooker (present at Boston for the synod that 
condemned Mrs. Hutchinson) proposed to Massachusetts a 
federal compact. For the moment the negotiations fell 
through because of States-rights jealousy. Much as Con- 
necticut feared Dutchman and Indian, she feared interference 
in her own affairs hardly less, and hesitated to intrust any 
Organiza- real authority to a central government. But, in 
tionini643 igJfS, commissioners from Massachusetts, Con- 
necticut, New Haven, and Plymouth met at Boston, and 
organized the New England Confederation. 

Rhode Island and the New Hampshire towns asked in 
vain for admission to this union. The leaders of Massachu- 
setts were wont to refer to Rhode Island as "that sewer"; 
and regarding the exclusion of New Hampshire, Winthrop 
wrote : "They ran a different course from us, both in their 
ministry and civil administration . . . for they . . . had 
made a tailor their mayor and had entertained one Hull, an 
excommunicated person, and very contentious, to be their 
minister." 

The date (1643) suggests an important relation between 
English and American history. The union of the colonies 
without sanction from England was really a defiance of 
authority. But war had just broken out in England be- 
tween King Charles and the Piu'itans. Accordingly, the 
colonies could excuse themselves (as they did) on the ground 



AND ITS CONSTITUTION 105 

of necessity, since the home government was temporarily 
unable to protect them ; while really they were influenced 
still more by the fact that it could not interfere. The pre- 
amble to the Articles states all other motives for the union 
admirably, but, naturally, it omits this last consideration. 
The Articles of Confederation established "a firm and per- 
petual league." For matters of common concern, a congress 
of eight commissioners, two from each of the four _ ... 

. The Articles 

colonies, was elected annually. These commis- 
sioners had ''full power from their severall Generall Courtes 
respectively" to determine upon war or peace, divide spoils, 
admit new confederates, and to manage "all things of like 
nature, which are the proper concomitants or consequents of 
such a Confederation for amity, offence, and defence, not in- 
termeddling ivith the Government of any of the Jurisdictions, 
which . . , is reserved entirely to themselves.''' The vote of 
six commissioners was to be final in all matters ; but if in 
any case six could not agree, then the matter was to be 
referred to the several colonial ''Courts" for negotiation 
between them. Special provision was made for the sur- 
render of fugitive criminals or "servants" escaping from 
one colony to another and for arbitration of differences that 
might arise between any two colonies of the union. 

This document compares well with the constitution of any 
earlier confederation in history. Its weak points were com- 
mon to all previous unions. The greatest difficulty And their 
arose from the fact that one of the confederates was working 
much larger than the others. Each of the three smaller 
colonies had about three thousand people : Massachusetts 
alone had fifteen thousand. Consequently she bore two 
thirds of all burdens, while she had onl.y a fourth share in the 
government. The Bay Colony made an earnest demand for 
three commissioners, but the smaller states unanimously 
resisted the claim. 

Under these conditions, Massachusetts became dissatis- 
fied. In 1653 six of the federal commissioners voted a 
levy of 500 men for war upon New Netherlands. Massa- 
chusetts felt least interested in the war, and her General 



106 THE NEW ENGLAND CONFEDERATION 

Court refused to furnish her quota of 300 men. In the 
language of later times, she nullified the act of the federal 
congress. After this, the commissioners were plainly only 
an advisory body. In 166'2-1664, the absorption of New 
Haven by Connecticut weakened the Confederation still 
further ; and it finally disappeared when Massachusetts 
lost her charter in 1684. 




English setnement, 'oeo 

Dutch settlement. lOSO 

Swedish settlement, toeo 

Limit of English occupation 
in iB90 1 



PAKT II — COLONIAL AMERICA 
CHAPTER YL 

THE STRUGGLE TO SAVE SELF-GOVERNMENT (1660-1690) 
I. A GENERAL VIEW 

The years 1660-1690 are a distinct period in colonial 
development. The first mark of the period is a vast expan- 
sion of territory. lu 1600 the English held two Territorial 
patches of coast, one, about the Chesapeake, the growth 
other, east of the Hudson. The two districts were sepa- 
rated by hundreds of miles of wilderness and by Dutch and 
Swedish possessions, and for more than twenty years no 
new English colony had been founded. Thirty years later 
the English colonies formed an unbroken band from the 
Penobscot to the Savannah. To the south of Virginia the 
Carolinas had been added (1663) ; to the north of Maryland 
appeared the splendid colony of Pennsylvania f 1681) ; while 
the rest of the old intermediate region had become English 
by conquest (New York, New Jersey, and Delaware). All 
the colonies, too, had broadened their area of settlement 
toward the interior. Population rose from 60,000 in 1660 to 
250,000 in 1690. 

The transformation, from isolated patches of settlement 
into a continuous colonial empire, brought home to English 
rulers the need of a uniform colonial policy, j^^^ ^ 
Charles I had had a "Colonial Council," but it colonial 
exercised little real control. In 1655, when Crom- ^° *^^ 
well took Jamaica from Spain, one of his officials drew up 
certain "Overtures touching a Council! to bee erected for 
foraigne Plantations." This paper suggested various meas- 
ures to make the colonies "understand . . . that their Head 

107 



108 " COLONIAL AMERICA," 1660-1690 

and Centre is Ileere," and after the Restoration, Charles 
II incorporated much of the document in his "Instructions" 
to a "Council for Foreign Plantations" (later succeeded by 
the "Lords of Trade" and in 169G by the "Board of Trade 
and Plantations"). 

This Council contained many of the noblest men of the 
time. It was instructed to study the state of the planta- 
The Coun- tious and the colonial policies of other countries ; 
cii for the to secure copies of the colonial charters and laws ; 
antations ^^^j ^^ have a general oversight of all colonial 
matters. In particular it was to endeavor "that the 
severall collonies bee drawn . . . into a more certaine, civill, 
and uniform waie of Government and distribution of pub- 
lick Justice, in v)hich they are at present .scandalously de- 
fective." During the period that we are now considering, 
the Council was hard-working, honest, and well-meaning; 
but it was ignorant of affairs in tlie colonies and out of 
touch with the people that it was trying to rule. It strove 
to get three results : uniformity and economy in colonial ad- 
ministration ; better military defense ; and neiv commercial 
regidations. 

European countries valued colonies as a source of goods 
not produced at home, and as a sure market for home manu- 
The com- factures. So each colonizing country adopted 
merciai "navigation acts" to restrict the trade of its col- 

svstcni of '^ 

European onies exclusively to itself. Without this prospect, 
countries [\^ would uot havc seemed worth while to found 
colonies at all. By modern standards, all these commercial 
systems were absurd and tyrannical ; but the Engli.sh system 
was more enlightened, and far less selfi.'ih and hari^h, than 
that of Holland or France or Spain. 

At the other end of the scale was Spain. ^ For two hundred 
years all commerce from Spanish America could pass to the 
Spain and outer world ouly through Spain, and through only 
her colonies g^jg Spanish port. — first Seville, and afterward 
Cadiz. Worse still, until 1748, goods could be imported from 

' This paragraph is condensed from the admirable account in Bernard Moses' 
Establishmenf of Spanish Rule in America, 20-20 and 285-292. 



THE ENGLISH NAVIGATION ACTS 109 

Europe through only tlie one favored port in Spain, and (for 
all the wide-lying New Spain in North and South America) 
to only two American ports, and at special times. Two fleets 
sailed each year from Spain, — one to Porto Bello on the 
Isthmus, for all the South American trade ; the otlier to 
Vera Cruz in Mexico. All other trade, even between the 
separate Spanish colonies, loas 'prohibited under penalti/ of 
death. From the most distant districts, — Chile or Argen- 
tina, — goods for export had to be carried to Porto Bello 
to meet the annual fleet. There was held a forty days' fair, 
to exchange the European imports for precious metals, 
tropical woods, and hides. By this arrangement, in many 
parts of South America, the prices of European goods were 
increased to five or six times the natural amount, while the 
products with which the colonies paid were robbed of value 
by the cost of transportation. The cattle raised on the vast 
plains of the Argentine could reach a lawful market only by 
being carried across the continent to Peru, thence by sea to 
Panama, again across the Isthmus to Porto Bello, and (one 
chance a year) from that port to Seville. In the early years 
of the eighteenth century, at Buenos Aires, an ox was worth 
a dollar, and a sheep three or four cents, — and values had 
risen to this point only because some contraband trade had 
sprung up, in spite of the terrible penalties. To go from 
Spain to America, except to a few favored places, was not 
merely to go into exile, but to renounce civilization. The 
restrictions on trade prevented the colonists from starting 
with the achievements of European civilization, and drove 
them back, in many cases, to the barbarism of the 
natives. 

Compared with that sort of thing, England's policy was 
modern. Her statesmen did not aim, consciously, to bene- 
fit the home country at the expense of the planta- The English 
tions. They strove to make the parts of the empire '^®* 
helpful to one another, so that the empire as a whole 
might be self-supporting, — independent of the rest of the 
world in industry and economics. In large measure they 
wished this system of tariff "protection" for the industries 



110 "COLONIAL AMERICA," 1660-1690 

of the empire as a means toward military protection — like 
American statesmen after the war of 1812. 

As a continuous system, the Enghsh poHcy began with 
the "First Navigation Act'' of 1660. This law had two 
First Navi- purposes. The original one was semi-military, 
gation Act, to increase the shipping of the empire. Until this 
^^®° time, most European goods, even most English 

goods, had been carried to the colonies by Dutch vessels. 
England's navy had sunk low. But the safety of the island 
and of her colonies rested upon command of the seas. In 
that day, trading vessels were easily turned into war vessels ; 
and to build up a merchant marine was a natural measure 
for naval protection. Accordingly this law provided that 
all trade between England and the colonies should be 
carried only in ships oivned, and, for the most part, 
maimed, by Englishmen or colonials, — "ships which truly . . . 
belong to the people of England or Ireland ... or are built 
of and belonging to any of the said Plantations or Territories 
. . . and whereof the master and three fourths of the mariners 
at least are English.'" (The word "English" always in- 
cluded the colonials, and it was specifically so defined, for this 
passage, in a supplemental Navigation Act two years later.) 

This part of the Act was highly successful. Holland's 
carrying trade, and her naval supremacy, received a deadly 
blow. Nor did this part of the law discriminate against 
the colonies in the interest of England. Rather it directly 
benefited them, especially the northern ones. Temporarily, 
trade suffered from lack of ships, and from consequent high 
freights ; but the Act created the great shipbuilding industry 
of New England. In less than twenty years the colonies 
were selling ships to England. By 1720 Massachusetts 
alone launched 150 ships a year, and the shipbuilders of 
England were petitioning parliament, in vain, for protection 
against this invasion upon their ancient industry. The 
carrying trade of the empire also passed largely into the 
hands of New Englanders ; and this trade was protected by 
the English war navy, to which the colonists contributed 
only a few masts from their forests. 



THE ENGLISH NAVIGATION ACTS 111 

A second part of the law (added at the last moment by 
amendment) somewhat restricted exports. Sugar, tobacco, 
cotton-wool, gmger, and dyewoods were there- 
after to be carried from a colony only to Eng- enumerated 
land or another English colony. These "enumer- articles 
ated articles" were all semi-tropical. New 
England could still send her lumber, furs, fish, oil, and rum 
to any part of the world — if only they were carried in her 
own or English ships. Tobacco was the only "enumerated 
article" produced /or export at that time on the continent 
of North America^ ; and for the restriction an tobacco, England 
gave an offset: she forbade her own citizens to raise tobacco, 
or import it from foreign colonies, so giving Virginia and 
Maryland a monopoly of her market. 

The import trade was first restricted by the Navigation 
Act of 1663, Thereafter, it was ordered, all European goods 
must pass to the colonies only through English ports, ^j^^ ^^.^ ^^ 
This act was designed to keep colonial trade from 1663 as to 
falling into the hands of other countries. It in- ^^^°^ ^ 
creased the profits of English merchants ; but, to guard the 
colonists against paying double taxes, a rebate of the Eng- 
lish import duties was allowed on all goods reshipped for the 
colonies. 

This was as far as the system went until after 1690. The 
subtropical colonies could export their products only to 
England or other English colonies ; all imports to all colo- 
nies must come through England ; all ships in the colonial 
trade must be English or colonial. A Massachusetts ship 
could still carry smy product of that colony to any part of 
the world, exchange for goods there, carry these goods to 
England, and then "reship" them for an American port, or 
exchange them for other European goods in the English 
markets, to be then carried to America. In 1660 tariff 

' American students find it hard to remember that the navigation laws were 
adopted mainly with a view to the English West Indies, not with regard to the 
colonies that grew later into the United States. In 1697 Jamaica alone had more 
commerce with England than all the continental colonies together north of Virginia, 
while the West Indies, Maryland, and Virginia (the sugar and tobacco colonies) 
had seven times as much English trade as all the other colonies. 



m NEW ENGLAND, 1660-1690 

duties, both for the colonies, and for England, had been im- 
posed on a long list of goods. In the colonies, houiever, this 
Act was alicays practically a dead letter. There was no 
proper machinery to enforce it ; and no serious attempt was 
made to do so. Whenever the restrictions were seriously 
troublesome, they were evaded by smuggling. In 1700, it 
is estimated, one third the trade of New York was in smug- 
gled goods. 

II. NEW ENGLAND, 1060-1690 

At his accession in 1660, Charles II found himself beset 
with accusations against Massachusetts. In 1656 Quakers 
Massachu- ^^^ appeared in that colony. Three, who per- 
setts and sisted in returning after banishment, had been 
hanged, while several others, women among them, 
had been flogged brutally. The Quakers complained to 
Charles, and in 1660 he ordered the colony to send all im- 
prisoned Quakers to England for trial. But the men of 
Massachusetts were resolved to 'permit no appeal from their 
own courts. They chose rather to empty the jails and drop 
the persecution. 

Afterward, for a time, the persecution was renewed, with 
Charles' approval, but no more executions took place. 
Imprisonments and whippings were the common fate of 
Quakers in England and in all the colonies of that time 
except Rhode Island. These Quakers, of course, were not 
And the the quict, sober brethren of later times : many of 
Quakers them were half-mad fanatics. It was a little hard, 
as Lowell says, to know what to do with a woman who per- 
sisted in interrupting your honored minister in his sermon, 
calling him Priest of Baal, and breaking empty bottles over 
his head (in sign of his emptiness), or who " bore conclusive 
evidence to the Fall of Man by walking up the broad aisle 
of the meeting-house in a costume which that event had put 
forever out of fashion." None the less, the three execu- 
tions remain a bloody blot on the fame of Massachusetts. 
Nowhere else was a death penalty inflicted by law. It does 
seem a little strained, however, to speak, as a recent 



CONNECTICUT AND RHODE ISLAND CHARTERS 113 



historian does, of "wholesale hangings" of Quakers in 
Massachusetts. 

The King was irritated also by learning that Massachu- 
setts had usurped the right to coin money (the famous 
"Pine Tree Shillings") during the Common- ^^. . 

PI • other in- 

wealth, and that two of the "regicide" judges subordina- 
who had passed sentence on his father were still ^^°^ 
sheltered in New England. Worst of all, perhaps, the 
Bay Colony disregarded the Navigation Acts, and, in 
1661, even adopted a daring resolution styling such legisla- 
tion "an infringement of our rights." For the moment, 
Charles contented himself with demanding that an oath 
of allegiance be taken 
in the colony ; that the 
Episcopalian service be 
permitted ; and that the 
franchise be extended to 
all men "orthodox in re- 
ligion and of competent 
estate." The colony 
complied w^itli the first 
demand, ignored the 
second, and evaded the 
third. An act of the General Court did provide that a non- 
churchmember might be made a freeman, if his good char- 
acter were testified to by the minister of his town and if he 
paid a ten-shilling "rate" {local tax). But the Puritan 
ministers gave few such certificates to those outside their 
own folds, and few men were then called upon to pay ten 
shillings in a single rate. So the number of freemen did 
not much increase. 

Connecticut, New Haven, and Rhode Island had no legal 
standing in England. The people were squatters, and the 
governments unauthorized. Now that order was ' 

, . T^ , , . 1 • 1 1 • Connecticut 

restored m England, it was plam that somethmg and Rhode 
must be done to remedy this condition ; and all island 
three colonies sent agents to England to secure 
royal charters. Connecticut and Rhode Island were suc- 




A Pine Tree Shilling (xii pence). From 
the original in the Collections of the Massa- 
chusetts Historical Society. The coin bears no 
allusion to England's authority. 



114 NEW ENGLAND., 1660-1690 

cessfiil almost beyond belief. They were left with self- 
government nearly as complete as before. In neither 
colony did the crown appoint the governor or any other 
important official. This remarkable liberality was due 
partly to the careless good nature of Charles in the early 
portion of his reign ; partly to an enthusiasm among Eng- 
lish officials just then for the colonies ; and partly, perhaps, 
to a willingness to build up other New England govern- 
ments so as to offset the stiff-necked Bay Colony. All that 
the Massachusetts charter had become, — this and more 
these new charters were from the first. They made the 
settlers a "corporation upon the place," and sanctioned 
democratic self-government. With good reason they were 
cherished and venerated. At the time of the Revolution 
they received the name of constitutions ; and they con- 
tinued in force, without other alteration, in Connecticut 
until 1818, and in Rhode Island until 1842. 

A glance at the map on page 99 shows sufficient reason 
why New Haven and Connecticut should not both receive 
charters. The question was which should swallow the 
other. New Haven used little diplomacy in her negotia- 
tions ; and possibly she was too much of the Massa- 
chusetts type to find favor in any case. Her territory 
was included in the Connecticut grant. This began the 
process of consolidation which was soon to be tried on a 
larger scale. 

Friction with Massachusetts continued. Episcopalians 
there complained still that for thirty years they had been 
Continued Tobbcd of civil and religious rights. So in 1664 
friction Charles sent commissioners to regulate New 

England England and to conquer New Netherlands from 
and Massa- the Dutcli — with wlioui England was at war. 
In their military expedition the commissioners 
were entirely successful. Connecticut, Rhode Island, and 
Plymouth then recognized their authority cordially, and 
even permitted them to hear appeals from colonial courts; 
but Massachusetts still gave them scant welcome. 



THE COMMISSIONERS OF 16G4 115 

The matter of appeals was a chief point in the commis- 
sioners' instructions. It was to be the means of enforcing 
royal authority. The men of Massachusetts The com- 
were sternly resolved not to yield the point, missioners 
After weeks of futile discussion, the commis- question of 
sioners announced a day when they would sit appeals 
as a court of ap]:)eals in Boston. At sunrise on that day, 
by order of the Massachusetts magistrates, a crier, with 
trumpet, passed through the town, warning all citizens 
not to recognize the court. No one ventured to disobey 
the stern Pin-itan government, and the chagrined com- 
missioners returned to England. 

There they at once recommended that Massachusetts be 
deprived of its charter. But the next year the victorious 
Dutch fleet was in the Thames. Then came the great 
London fire and the plague. The Colonial Board did re- 
peatedly order Massachusetts to send an agent to England 
to arrange a set tlement ; but the colony procrastinated 
stubbornly, and for ten years with success. In 1675, how- 
ever, a great Indian outbreak, known as King Philip's 
War, weakened Massachusetts. Just at this time, „ 
too, Charles, entering upon a more despotic period chusetts 
at home, began to act more vigorously toward the *°^®^ ^®^ 

. o t' ^ charter 

colonies ; and in 1684 the Court of the Kings 
Bench declared the charter of 16'-29 forfeited and void. 

The Lords of Trade had decided that to have so many 
independent governments "without a more immediate 
dependence upon the crown" was ''preiudicial" „ 

\^,,, . , 1 1 Consohda- 

to England s mterest ; and they drew up a plan tion under 
for the union of Massachusetts, Plymouth, and ^^^^ . 
the Maine and New Hampshire towns, under one 
royal governor-general. They would gladly have included 
Connecticut and Rhode Island in the plan, and so con- 
solidated all New England into one province, but the 
recent charters stood in the way ; and, unlike Massa- 
chusetts, these colonies had given no excuse for legal pro- 
ceedings against them. Still, when Charles died in 1685, 
James II forced the consolidation, in spite of the charters. 



116 NEW ENGLAND, 16G0-1690 

He appointed Sir Edmund Andros governor-general of all 
New England, and instructed him to set aside the govern- 
ments of Connecticut and Rhode Island by force. 

The original plan of the Lords of Trade had provided 
one elected legislature for New England. James struck out 
this clause, leaving the government despotic as well as 
unified, — despite the declaration of the attorney-general 
in England that the colonists had the right "to consent to 
such laws and taxes as should be made or imposed on them." 
James also once more extended the territory to which the 
plan should apply. He was already proprietor of New 
York and New Jersey (page 128), and these colonies were 
soon united with New England under the rule of Andros. 

Andros was a bluff, hot-tempered soldier. He was com- 
mander of the soldiery he brought with him and of the mili- 
The rule of tia ; and, with the consent of an appointed coun- 
Andros q[\^ }jg ^g^g authorized to lay taxes, make laws, ad- 

minister justice, and grant lands. His management of mili- 
tary affairs was admirable, and he saved New England from 
serious Indian danger; but the colonists gave him scant 
credit. In other matters, naturally, he clashed violently with 
the settlers. He insisted that Episcopalian services should be 
held on at least part of each Sunday in cne of the Boston 
churches. To the Puritans this was a bitter offense. Land 
titles, too, were a fruitful source of irritation. In granting 
lands, the colonies had paid little attention to the forms of 
English law or to proper precaution against future confusion. 
Andros provided for accurate surveys, and compelled old 
holders to take out new deeds, with small fees for registra- 
tion. He treated all the common lands, too, as crown land. 

More serious was the total disappearance of self-govern- 
ment and even of civil rights. Andros ordered the old taxes 
to be continued. Some Massachusetts towns resisted ; and 
at Ipswich a town meeting voted that such method of raising 
taxes "did infringe their liberty as free-born English sub- 
jects." The offenders were tried for "seditious votes and 
writings," not before the usual courts, but by a special com- 
mission. The jury was packed and was browbeaten into a 



ANDROS AND THE SETTLEMENT OF 1690 



117 




verdict of guilty, and leading citizens who had dared to stand 
up against tyranny were imprisoned and ruinously fined. 

This absolute government lasted two years and a half. 
Massachusetts was getting ready to rebel ; but under or- 
dinary conditions a rising would have been put And its 
down bloodily. Thanks to the " Glorious Revolu- overthrow 
tion" of 1688 in Old England, the rising when it came was 

successful and bloodless. 
In April, 1689, Boston 
learned that James II 
was a fugitive. The 
new king, William of 
Orange, had issued a 
"Declaration," inviting 
all boroughs in England, 
and all officials unjustly 
deprived of charters and 
positions by James, to 
resume their former 
powers. The colonists 
assumed that this sanc- 
tioned like action by 
them also. The people 
of Boston and neighbor- 
ing towns seized a war 
vessel in the harbor, 
imprisoned Andros, and 
restored the charter 
government. Connecti- 
cut and Rhode Island 
also revived their former 
charters. 

William III would 
have been glad to con- 
tinue part of Thesettle- 
the Stuart policy in America. He wished, so far ment of 
as possible, to consolidate small jurisdictions into 
large ones, and to keep the governor and judges in each 



April iS''- l<89 



,a- €nHif6,uVu;U a;tt)iiiiv o(licr5 tlic liilMMtiiiifs of 
iit:s-i:oiiiii.i;i'o"i.''!dC[3aDucfiir, kiinj futjinifD Wiv.i) 
lii; |; C'l Us futi.xi! uvM\^ to ariiv3, m liic tu(t mo'-ioii 
Hil!frroa!( Uitr,- luikiUv iCinoiMiit, arc pr.v.cii liv ilie 
jinrnu >;? ;'j;n:"c anor.fcftu'.'to- acquimtvoar Fv, ?/,',•«>, tD\t 
for thf Ciiiniuf! ,uiD ecciimi' of ilu- p.opl? Jii'.imiaiiattiis 
Coiiiurr" from tlif i:miimtiu i^angtva tl'n' m iiiv lu.r.'io lie 
op;ii, tviD arc tcpM'ra uiuo, aiiD fo: vcuv Ojm ^-Mftrr ; lCU- inajc 
ir irfrfilur th.it I'ou ionliiuitl) SuirfiiDiT, aiiO Dtltor tip tl)£ 
ejbaiTiiuiu .iiiDfJtnfiraiionitabc isnfittoiO, to lit D.fpoftD 
arforaiiiit to Croc; am V.wix y.\ f.toiii tUf Cicwn of p.»^UhJ^ 
lvte.-!iiiTiiDjr;;ii'ai3iitiD lUM-arnto, )3tGiiiif;iig all ®-aintp 
fw'u aoltdft to ;Viur ^fli, o? aiiv otUr o.' vouc 'ScittUiiitii nnb 
€'3;ilii\ir5mp.rioiiorvLil,i I -. cifi'.M act affiirfB tbcv Uiill 
tnDM-ioar tlrctaSiina of t!;; jMriitiiauoiis bi'Stojiii, if ani>oi)= 
pot'iiioi! h" utaDf. 



To St, lAmond Androji Kr.i;;ht. 





Joha K,chjr'/li. 
Fhjla Cc-,k. 

7../--. f.-.(lcr- 







Smiull S'limfloK. 
Hartkct. Caic. 



Boston's Summons to Andros ; from the 
Massachusetts State Archives. The first 
signature is that of the clergyman who soon 
after uttered the words about "choice grain" 
sent into the wilderness (page 62). 



118 NEW ENGLAND, 1660-1690 

colony dependent upon himself. The Connecticut and 
Rhode Island charters stood in the way of a complete re- 
arrangement of this sort ; and the King's lawyers assured 
him that those grants still held good, — ^ since legal proceedings 
against them had never been completed. Massachusetts did 
not fare so well. Her cliarter had been formally surrendered. 
The colony strove skillfully to obtain a regrant of the original 
patent; but the best it could do was to accept a new one. 

To conciliate William, the promised reform in the fran- 
chise was at last made effective. The certificate of a clergy- 
man as to the applicant's fitness was not required, and the 
taxpaying qualification was reduced from ten shillings to 
four. Then in a few weeks 909 new freemen were admitted 
■ — more than in the preceding sixteen years. Notwithstand- 
ing this sudden access of liberality, there were within the 
colony considerable bodies of people dissatisfied with the 
Puritan rule. Several petitions were sent to the King against 
the renewal of the old charter, — one with signatures of two 
hundred and fifty persons who call themselves "Merchants 
and inhabitants of Boston." 

The "Charter of 1691" created a government for Massa- 
chusetts more like that of Virginia than like that of Con- 
Massa- necticut. The crown appointed and removed the 

chusetts governor. The Assembly nominated the Council, 

virtually a? , .. "^ tiip i 

royal but these nominations were valid only alter the 

province governor's approval. The governor could adjourn 
or dissolve the Assembly at will ; and he, and the crown, 
held an absolute veto upon all its acts. The higher judiciary 
were appointed l)y the governor ; and appeals to the king in 
council were provided for, in cases where the sum in dispute 
amounted to £300. 

These four provisions, to all practical intents, made 
Massachusetts a royal province. Two other provisions, 
thoroughly praiseworthy, overthrew the old theocracy. 
Religious freedom for all Protestant sects was promised ; 
and the franchise was given to all men owning land of 
forty shillings annual value, or possessing forty pounds 



VIRGINIA AND THE CAVALIERS 119 

in personal property. This alternative was a liberal addi- 
tion to the ancient English " forty shilling " real estate 
qualification. 

III. VIRGINL\, 1660-1690 

During the Commonwealth, many of the dispossessed 
royalist gentry of England turned their faces toward the 
New World, — as the Puritans had done in their xhe Cavalier 
hour of gloom a generation earlier. At the Res- immigration 
toration, the royalists who were still in England expected to 
get back the lands they had lost. But the great majority 
were disappointed of this hope, and so the movement to 
America received new impetus. Practically all this emigra- 
tion went to Virginia. Between 1650 and 1670, the popu- 
lation of that colony rose from 15,000 to 40,000; and more 
than half of this increase came from immigration. 

This migration ranks in importance side by side with the 
earlier ten-year Puritan movement. It made Virginia the 
land of the Cavaliers. In this period there appeared in 
America the ancestors of the Virginia Harrisons, Lees, 
Masons, Madisons, Marshalls, Monroes, Nelsons, Nicho- 
lases, Pages, Peytons, Pendletons, Randolphs, Wythes, 
Washingtons. These country gentry fitted easily into the 
rural society of Virginia, and there became an attrac- 
tive and lovable set of leaders. They were somewhat less 
active intellectually than the Puritan leaders, less stimulated 
by the friction of town life and by religious controversy, and 
less inclined to mark out new ways in state or church. But 
they were robust, dauntless, chivalrous, devout, and deeply 
imbued with the best tradition of the best part of England 
{rural England) in England's greatest century. The earlier 
migration to Virginia had given that colony a noble history ; 
but it was this Cavalier immigration of the fifties and sixties 
which a century later flowered into Virginia's splendid galaxy 
of Revolutionary patriots, and, a little later still, justified to 
the Old Dominion her proud title, "Mother of Presidents." 

The party epithets, Cavalier and Roundhead, should not 
blind us to the close likeness between the gentry elements 



120 VIRGINIA, 1660-1G90 

in Massachusetts and Virginia. The Cavalier immigrants 
were not graceless, riotous hangers-on of the court, slavishly 
subservient to despotism, as they are sometimes pictured. 
They were God-fearing, high-minded gentlemen, who had 
loved liberty only a degree less than they had feared an- 
archy, — men of the same social stamp and habits of thought 
as the Winthrops, Dudleys, and Humphreys of the Bay 
Colony, and the Hampdens, Pyms, and Eliots in England, 
with whom they had stood shoulder to shoulder for a gen- 
eration of constitutional struggle before the Civil War, and 
from whom they separated at last with mutual grief when 
the great war set brother against brother. 

True, the first effect of the Cavaliers on politics in Virginia 
was bad. In 1660 a new Assembly was elected, and the 
Political ^^^^ enthusiasm for the Restoration filled it with 
reaction, Cavalier hotheads. Since 1628, a new Assembly 
had been chosen at least once in two years ; but, 
by an arbitrary stretch of power. Governor Berkeley (page 
41) kept this unfit Cavalier Assembly alive, without a new 
election for sixteen years — much as his royal master in Eng- 
land did with his unfit Cavalier Parliament. Moreover, 
Berkeley, in this second term, was an old man, tortured by 
ill-health, arrogant, peevish, vindictive, — an easy tool for 
a ring of greedy favorites. His long administration, from 
1660 to 1677, was a period of misgovernment and political 
reaction. 

With the Restoration, governor and Council ceased to be 
elective. Berkeley received a commission from King 
Charles ; and this, he felt, freed him from the restrictions 
the Assembly had placed upon him (page 41). According to 
the royal instructions, he resumed the absolute veto and the 
power to dissolve and call Assemblies at his will. 

These changes put the government back where it was 
before the Commonwealth. But this was not all. A law 
of 1670 took the right to vote from all but landowners 
("freeholders"),^ and in local government, the loss was 

' The franchise in Virginia had been exceedingly liberal. All free White males 
had had votes, — including former servants when their terms had expired. In 



REACTION AND REBELLION 121 

even more seriou!-'. The county raised local taxes and ex- 
pended them, and it passed " by-laws " of considerable 
importance. Until the Restoration these things were done 
in the county court, — a meeting of all free White males ; 
but now most of these powers were transferred from the open 
court to a Board of eight "Justices" in eacli county, ap- 
poiuted by the governor from the more important landowners. 
Other men could still come to the county courts as spec- 
tators, but their political power was limited to casting a 
vote now and then in the election of a new Assembly. 

Along with this political reaction went many other serious 
faults. Taxes were exorbitant, and were expended waste- 
fully. There was much unjust "class legislation," special 
such as the exemption of Councilors and their privileges 
families from taxation. The sheriffs (appointed by the 
governor on the advice of the county justices) and other 
law officers charged oppressive fees for simple and necessary 
services ; and the governor granted to his favorites vexatious 
trade monopolies. 

The 40,000 inhabitants of 1670 included 2000 Negro slaves 
and 6000 White bond servants. There were also several 
thousand ex-servants who had not acquired land and who 
remained as laborers on the plantations of their former mas- 
ters. The rest of the population consisted of a few hundred 
large planters and a large body of small planters. Dis- 
content was chronic in the servant class; and noio the small 
planters also ivere restive. They were practically unrepre- 
sented, and they felt rightly that they were overtaxed and 
discriminated against. The navigation laws intensified 
their grievances. The lack of vessels enough to transport 
tobacco to the English market did not much hurt the large 
planters, whose crops would be taken care of first ; but, for 
a time, the small planter often found his entire crop left on 
his hands, or (if he shipped at all) his small profits were 
eaten up bj^ the increased freights. 

1655, indeed, a law was passed restricting the right to "householders," but it was 
repealed the next year on the ground that it was "hard and unagreeable to reason 
that any shall pay equal taxes and not have a voice in elections." 



122 VIRGINIA, 1660-1690 

These conditions led to the first "rebelhon" in America. 
The occasion was an Indian outbreak which Berkeley's 
Bacon's inefficient government let go without check. 
Rebeiuon Finally the savages ravaged an outlying plantation 
of Nathaniel Bacon, an energetic young planter. Bacon 
raised troops and punished the Indians terribly in two cam- 
paigns ; but Berkeley declared the young captain and his 
followers rebels, because they had secured no commission for 
military action. 

There followed an obscure quarrel over a commission ex- 
torted from the governor; and this quarrel merged into a 
civil war. From a valiant Indian fighter, Bacon was 
suddenly transformed into a popular champion and a demo- 
cratic hero. Finding arms in their hands, he and his party 
tried to use them for social and political reform. "Bacon's 
Rebellion" became a rising against "special privilege." 
The fundamental cause was not discontent at the inefficiency 
of the government against the Indians, but social discontent. 

Berkeley was deserted. During much of the struggle, he 
could hardly muster a corporal's guard. The aristocracy, 
however, did not join Bacon. They were too much opposed 
to rebellion, and too jealous toward the democratic features 
of the movement ; so they simply held aloof from either 
side. But Bacon was supported by the great body of small 
planters, especially in the western counties. 

These sturdy, honest people were vilified, of course, 
especially after the failure of the rebellion, by aristocratic 
contemporaries. One Virginian gentleman refers to them 
as "Tag, rag, and bobtail." Another declared that Bacon 
"seduced the Vulgar and most ignorant People (two thirds 
of each county being of that Sorte) Soe that theire whole 
hearts and hopes were set upon him." Another describes 
the rebels as "a Rabble of the basest sorte of People whose 
eondicion was such as by a chaunge could not admitt of 
worse . . . not 20 in the whole Route but what were Idle 
and will not worke, or such whom Debaucherie or Idle 
Husbandry has brought in Debt beyond hopes or thought 



BACON'S REBELLION 123 

of payment . . . who, for the Ease of the Poore, will have 
no taxes . . . [and] talk openly of shareing men's Estates." 

When the rebellion began, popular clamor forced the 
governor to dissolve his fossilized Assembly, In the elec- 
tion of a new one, the restrictions upon the fran- " Bacon's 
chise were largely ignored, and a democratic body '^^^ " 
was chosen. One peevish gentleman declared, "Such was 
the prevalency of Bacon's Party that they chose, instead 
of Freeholders, Free men that had but lately crept out of the 
condition of Servants (which were never before Eligible) for 
their Burgesses." The new Assembly is known as Bacon's 
Assembly, and its admirable attempts at reform are called 
Bacon's laws. Manhood suffrage was restored ; a representa- 
tive Board was established in each county to act with the 
Justices in all matters of taxation and local legislation ; the 
exemptions of the privileged families were abolished ; fees 
were strictly regulated ; and various minor abuses were 
corrected. 

Bacon himself stood for an even more democratic program. 
Soon after the meeting of the Assembly he held a convention 
of his party at "the Middle Plantation," and there issued a 
proclamation in the name of "the Commons of Virginia," 
signing it "Nath Bacon, Gen'l By the Consent of the 
People." This document denounced the group of Berkeley's 
favorites as "sponges" that had sucked up the public 
treasure, and as "juggling parasites," and declared all who 
sheltered them to be "traitors to the people." 

But while Bacon was still in full tide of success, a sudden 
fever carried him off — and the Rebellion collapsed, for 
want of a leader. Berkeley took a shameful and Reaction 
bloody vengeance, until removed by the disgusted triumphant 
King. At the King's command, the next Assembly declared 
all "Bacon's laws" void; and so the "freehold" franchise 
was restored, — to continue two centuries.^ 

* In 173G a "freehold" for voting purposes was defined to be the ownership of 
100 acres of wild land, or 50 acres of improved land, or a house and lot in a town, 
— the house to be not less than 24 feet square. Just before the American Revolu- 
tion, these requirements were cut down one half. 



124 VIRGINIA, 1660-1690 

Henceforth all leadership belonged to the small class of great 
planters. Each man of this class was not merely a country 
The rule of gentleman, supervising the farming of large es- 
the gentry tates : he was also a merchant, with huge ware- 
houses and with agents in England. He sold in England not 
only his own tobacco, but also much of that of the small 
planters about him ; and, in return, he imported all manu- 
factured articles used on his plantations and on theirs, except 
the simple implements turned out by the plantation's own 
carpenter and blacksmith. He was also a lawyer, and a 
leader in society and in politics. He was usually one of the 
ruling "Justices" of his county, and one of the vestry of his 
parish ; and, if he did not sit in the governor's Council, 
he was pretty sure to be a Burgess — or at least to have 
much control in the election of one. 

Much has been said above on the admirable qualities of 
this ruling class. One darker feature remains to be made 
plain. These men gave a large part of their time to the 
public service, and none of their offices had salaries. In 
time of public peril, too, they were always ready to give 
fortune and life freely for the public need. But in ordinary 
times, many of them paid themselves indirectly for their de- 
votion to the public service by what would to-day be called 
graft. They controlled the political machinery ; and they 
saw nothing wrong in filling their pockets, and their friends' 
pockets, out of the public resources. 

Taxes were paid commonly in tobacco. The "Receiver" 
was some one of the coterie of great planters. It was easy 
Special '^^^ h\\\\ to accept from friends and other influen- 

priviieges tial taxpayers a poorer grade of tobacco than he 
*^^*" would take from a smaller planter. X\\ tobacco so 

received was afterward sold for the treasury. The English 
government tried earnestly to have the Receiver sell at auc- 
tion ; but he usually managed to sell "by private arrange- 
ment" — -often at a half or a third of the market value 
— to friends or associates. It was by so holding together 
and exchanging "favors" that the aristocracy maintained 
their power. 



I 



ARISTOCRATIC RULE CONFIRMED 125 

Especially ivas the^ public land a source of private riches. 
Governor and Assembly readily made grants of wild land to 
almost any applicant ; but law required the grantee to 
establish a certain number of settlers on each grant within 
ten years — one settler to every hundred acres — or the 
grant had to be declared forfeited. To locate and survey 
a tract cost somewhat, and to "settle" a large tract was 
impossible except to the wealthy. And the wealthiest had 
ways to shift this burden. In 1688 Colonel William Byrd 
secured a grant of more than three thousand acres. He 
failed to " settle " it ; but he was the chief officer of the colonial 
landoffice, and he managed to keep back the declaration of 
forfeiture until 1701. Then the tract was re-granted at once 
to his close friend, Nathaniel Harrison, who, after a decent 
interval, deeded it back to Byrd for another ten years' 
chance to settle. Another time, Byrd got nearly six 
thousand acres ; and having failed to settle in the ten 
years, he had it transferred to his son. These grants 
were the foundation of one of the greatest Virginia family 
estates. 

The small farmer in Virginia, after Bacon's failure, had 
only one political power : once a year or once in two years 
he could vote for a member of the Assembly. Elections 
took place at the county courts, and became social gather- 
ings also, with feasting and sports — wrestling, running, 
shooting at the mark — and sometimes with brutal rough- 
and-tumble fights. The speechmaking at these gatherings 
by rival candidates afforded no mean political training ; 
and as large a part of the free White population came out 
to vote in Virginia as in New England. But the common 
Virginia farmer voted on a much smaller range of matters, 
and much less often, than the common New England farmer. 
The common Virginian had no voice in the many questions 
of local government that were discussed and settled in the 
New England town meeting, or any part even in choosing 
local officials — which was so large a part of New England 
politics. 



126 VIRGINIA AND NEW ENGLAND 

After 1691 (page 118) the central goyernnients of Massa- 
chusetts and Virginia grew more and more alike, but the 
Local New England town and the Virginia county grew 

government farther and farther apart; and the influence of 
and in New local government upon society is so great that 
England Virginia as a whole grew more aristocratic, and 
Massachusetts more democratic. We have traced in part 
the development of these two types of local government ; 
but we ought also to notice that the difference between 
them was largely based on the physical differences be- 
tween the two colonies. In Virginia the soil, climate, and 
products made it profitable to cultivate large plantations 
by cheap labor under overseers. In Massachusetts, with 
its sterile soil, farming was profitable only when a man 
tilled his own ground, with at most one or two servants 
working under his own eyes. In Virginia, therefore, 
population became scattered, while in New England it re- 
mained grouped in little farm villages. In Virginia the people 
could not easily come together for effective action. The 
county became the political unit, and control fell naturally 
to the wealthy planters in small Boards. New England had 
no counties for some ^ime, and then only for judicial districts. 
The town remained the political unit ; and all the people 
of the town came together frequently, to take part in 
matters that concerned their common life. The Virginia 
type of local government developed the most remarkable group of 
leaders that the world has ever seen. The New England type 
trained a whole people to democracy by constant practice at 
their own doors, and so Americanized America. 

The Middle colonies, whose story we take up in the next 
chapter, developed an intermediate type of local govern- 
ment with both towns and counties ; and this mixed type 
became the common one in most of the West at a later day. 

Even in New England the town meeting has lost its 
vitality, through the influx of foreign population and the 
growth of city life. This is a serious matter. The original 
American democracy in the New England towns was "direct'* 



NEW YORK 127 

democracy. In its first form this cannot be restored. 
But to keep our political life sound, we must find substitutes 
for it. So far the only effective one suggested lies in a further 
development of the initiative, referendum, and recall, — 
devices of direct democracy which also were originated in 
early New England. 

IV. NEW COLONIES, 1660-1690 

These same thirty years, 1660-1690, saw the number of 
English colonies in America doubled — from six to twelve. 
Soon after 1660 the beginnings of settlement were made in 
the Carolinas; the territory soon to be divided into New 
York, New Jersey, and Delaware was conquered from the 
Dutch ; and Penn became proprietor of Pennsylvania. In 
all these new colonies the settlers waged sturdy consti- 
tutional struggles^ for self-government, ignoring or oppos- 
ing the proprietary claims. 

While New York was the Dutch New Netherlands, the 
people had no self-government whatever. The colony was 
a huge plantation (like early Virginia) under xhe English 
the arbitrary rule of the "Director General" and movement 
his Council, appointed in Holland. There were government 
a number of great landlords (patroo)is) in the in New 
colony ; and, in local affairs, each patroon had 
feudal authority over the villages of settlers on his lands. 
The only promising movement for self-government under Dutch 
rule came from English immigrants. Four English towns 
had been established on Long Island while it was claimed 
by Connecticut. These afterwards passed under the rule of 
New Netherlands. In 1653 a meeting of representatives 
from various parts of the colony was held, to demand from 
Director Stuyvesant a measure of self-government. This 
meeting was inspired by the English towns, and it was domi- 
nated by their delegates. The "remonstrance" to Stuy- 
vesant was drawn in the English language ; the signatures 
are largely English names ; and the document contains 



128 NEW COLONIES, 1660-1690 

the democratic English phrases of that day. Stuyvesant, 
in exphiining the matter to the authorities in Holland, wrote : 
"It ought to be remembered that the Englishmen, ivho are 
the authors and leaders in these innovations, enjoy more 
privileges than the Exemptions of New Netherlands grant 
to any Hollander." 

Before true representative government grew out of this 
agitation, came the English concj[uest of New Amsterdam in 
1664 (page 114). King Charles gave the con- 
wins repre- qucred province to his brother James, Duke of 
sentative York, for wliom it was renamed. The population 

government . , t7< r i j i 

was mamly non-English ; and, as a conquered 
people, it had no constitutional claim to political rights. 
Accordingly, the charter to James said nothing of any share 
by the people in the government. In spite of this, the gover- 
nor, Nichols, found himself obliged to satisfy the Long Island 
towns by promising them privileges "equal to those in the 
New England colonies," and it soon proved necessary to intro- 
duce a represeritative Assembly (1682). Down to the Revolu- 
tion, however, the governor had more extensive prerogatives 
in New York than in any other colony. 

Early Pennsylvania owed more to William Penn than any 
other colony did to its proprietor. Penn is one of the strik- 
Wiiiiam ing figures in history. Son of a famous and wealthy 
Penn English admiral who had added Jamaica to Eng- 

land's colonies, he risked his inheritance, as well as all pros- 
pect of worldly promotion, in order to join the Quakers. 
Happily for the world, his resources were not taken from him 
after all, and he kept the warm friendship of men so differ- 
ent from himself as the royal brothers, Charles and James. 
Through this friendship, Penn was selected to help some 
Quaker proprietors organize the colony of New Jersey, and 
thereby he became interested in trying a "Holy Experiment" 
in a colony of his own. The Council for colonial affairs had 
already become jealous of proprietary grants (page 115) ; 
but James readily gave him the old Swedish settlements on 
the Delaware, — then part of conquered New York. Penn, 



PENNSYLVANIA 



129 



however, wished a still freer field to work in, and soon he 
secured from King Charles, in consideration of a large debt 
due him from the crown, a grant of wild territory west of 
the Delaware between New York and Maryland. 

Owing to geograph- 
ical ignorance, the 
grant conflicted with 
those of Massachu- 
setts and Connecticut, 
and especially with 
those of New York 
and Maryland. The 
adjustment with 
Maryland was not 
finally accomplished 
until 1767, when 
Mason and Dixon, 
two English survey- 
ors, ran the boundary 
line that goes by their 
name — commonly re- 
ferred to in later his- 
tory as the dividing William Penn at 22 (before his conversion). 
line between North From the painting by Sir Peter Lely, now in 

and South. 




the gallery of the Pennsylvania Historical 
Society. 



'PJ^g Pennsyl- 
vania 



Penn's charter of 1680 gave him proprietary power like that 
of Baltimore in Maryland, with some limitations. Settlers 
were guaranteed the right of appeal from colonial .... 
courts to the king in council, and all colonial charter for 
laws were to be subject to a royal veto. 
Quaker colony was required to tolerate the es- 
tablished English church, and especial emphasis was placed 
upon obedience to the navigation laws. A unique clause 
renounced all authority on the part of the crown to tax the 
colonists without the consent of the Assembly or of Parlia- 
ment, — an indirect assertion that Parliament might tax 
the colony. The Delaware settlements were not covered 



130 NEW COLONIES AFTER 1660 

by the charter, but had a similar form of government under 
the same proprietor. 

Pennsylvania knew none of the desperate hardships that 
make so large a part of the story of the earlier colonies. 
The wealthy Quakers of England and Wales 
Pennsyi- helped the enterprise cordially, and the Men- 
^^'^f nonites (a German sect somewhat resembling 

Quakers) poured in a large and industrious im- 
migration. In 1687 one of their settlements voiced the 
first protest in America against slavery : "Those who steal 
or rob men, and those who buy or purchase them, — are 
they not all alike .f^ Here is liberty of conscience . . . and 
here ought to be likewise liberty of the body. . . . To bring 
men hither or to robb or sell them against their will, we 
stand against." Thanks to Penn's wise and just policy with 
the natives, there were no Indian troubles. Population 
increased rapidly, and material prosperity was unbroken. 
By 1700 (when only twenty years old) the colony stood next 
to Virginia and Massachusetts in wealth and numbers, 
tlnlike other colonies, except conquered New York, the 
population was at least half non-English from the first, — 
Welsh, Germans, Swedes, Dutch, French, Danes, and Finns. 

Penn took no thought to extend his own powers. His 
ideas, for the time, were broad and noble. "The nations 
Penn and Want a precedent for a just and righteous govern- 
his colonists ment," he wrote. . . . ''The people must rule.'' 
And again, in a letter to a friend, "I propose ... to leave 
myself and my successors no power of doing mischief — that 
the will of one man may not hinder the good of a whole 
country." To the expected settlers he proclaimed (1681), 
"You shall be governed by laws of your own making, and 
live a free and, if you will, a sober and industrious people." 

The first "Frame of Government" granted by Penn to the 
colonists was very liberal but it was clumsy ; and even with a 
proprietor so unselfish and settlers so good, politics were 
confused by bitter quarrels for some years. Finally Penn was 
persuaded to substitute for that first charter a new funda- 
mental law, the Charter of 1701. The colonists accepted 



PENNSYLVANIA CHARTER OF 1701 131 

this by formal compact, and it remained the constitution of 
Pennsylvania until 1776. The governor was appointed by 
the proprietor, and had a veto upon all legislation. 
He was aided by an appointed Council, — which charter of 
body was not part of the legislature. The people ^'^^^ *° **^® 
chose a one-House Assembly each year. This 
body had complete control over its own sittings : the charter fixed 
a date for the annual meeting, and provided that the Assem- 
bly should be dissolved only by its own vote. Freedom of con- 
science was guaranteed to all who believed in "one Almighty 
God"; and the franchise was given to all who accepted 
Christ as the "Savior of the World" and who owned 50 
acres of land or £50 personal estate. Pennsylvania was the 
only colony in which Roman Catholics had political rights 
in the eighteenth century. (Rhode Island disfranchised 
them in 1719, and for Maryland, see page 46.) 

The provision for religious freedom was declared not 
subject to amendment. All other parts of the charter 
could be amended by the joint action of the proprietor and 
six sevenths of the Assembly. This was the first written 
constitution to provide a definite machinery for its own amend- 
ment. 

The "Restoration" of Charles II began a new era for the 
English race; but the two divisions of Englishmen on 
opposite sides of the Atlantic met very different summary 
fates. In England itself, the second Stuart period for iseo- 
(1660-1688) was a time of infamy and peril. In ^®^° 
America, it was singularly progressive and attractive. For 
the first time the government of the home land took an 
active part in fostering the plantations ; and the separate 
colonies first began to have a common history. Three great 
characteristics marked the period : — 

English territory in America was greatly expanded. 

The English government established its first real Three char- 
" colonial department,'" to regulate colonial affairs acteristks 
and to draw the plantations into a closer dependence upon 
England. 



132 "COLONIAL AMERICANS," 1660-1690 

This new attitude of the home government, both in its 
wise and unwise appHcations, stirred the colonists to a new 
insistence upon their rights of self-government. 

Thus there developed an "irrepressible conflict" between 
the natural and wholesome English demand for imperial 
The struggle unity and the even more indispensable American 
to save self- demand for local freedom. Of this struggle the 
government j-j^^g^ picturesque episodes are Bacon's Rebellion in 
Virginia and the Andros incident in New England. The con- 
flict was intensified by evil traits on both sides, — by the per- 
sonal despotic inclinations of James II and of some of his 
agents in the colonies, and by pettiness and ignorance on the 
part of the colonists ; and each party was blind to the good 
on the other side. Still the unconquerable determination of 
the colonists to manage their own affairs, even though in- 
spired in part by narrow prejudice, is the central fact of the 
period. If we mark the period by one phrase we may best 
call it the era of the struggle to save self-government. 

During this period, too, the view-point for our history is 
shifting. Until 1660, the colonists are Englishmen — enter- 
Engiish prising Englishmen busied in establishing them- 

pioneers sclvcs ou Scattered outlying frontiers. After 1690, 
colonial they are Americans — colonial Americans, it is true, 
Americans dependent still upon England, partly from custom, 
partly from affection, and largely from need of protection 
against the French on the north. 

The marks of this period are all found, intensified, in the 
next seventy years, — with the addition of one new element, 
the incessant war with the French and Indians. 



CHAPTER \ II 

"COLONIAL AMERICANS,' 1690-1763 

Despite frequent wars, the seventy years between the 
English Revolution and the American Revolution (1690-1760) 
were a period of marvelous prosperity for the col- seventy 
onies. The older districts grew from straggling years of 
frontiers into rich and powerful communities p^'^^p®" ^ 
marked by self-reliance and intense local patriotism. A 
new colony, Georgia, was added on the south (1732), and 
new frontiers were thrown out on the west. Population 
rose sixfold — from 250,000 (page 107) to 1,600,000; and 
large non-English elements appeared, especially in the 
middle colonies. 

The most numerous of these were the German Protestants, 
driven from their homes in South Germany by religious 
persecution and by the wars of Louis XIV. This Non-Eng- 
immigration began to arrive about 1690. It went Ushimmi- 
mainly to New York and the Carolinas and es- ^* *°° 
pecially to Pennsylvania. To the latter colony alone more 
than 100,000 Germans came between 1700 and 1775. A 
smaller but highly valuable contribution to American blood 
was made by the Huguenots, driven from France after 1683 
by the persecution of Louis XIV. They came mainly to 
the Carolinas ; but some settled in New England, New York, 
and Virginia. The names Paul Revere, Peter Faneuil, and 
Governor Bowdoin suggest the services of their sons in 
Massachusetts. 

Another immigration of this period belongs especially 
to a new section — the Scotch-Irish settlement in the " West" 
The first fro7itier in America was the "tidewater" The chang- 
region, extending some fifty miles up the navi- mg frontiers 
gable streams. Near the mouth of such rivers, or on the 

133 



134 



"COLONIAL AMERICANS," 1690-1763 



harbors along the coast arose the first Hne of cities, — 
Boston, Portsmouth, Providence, New York, Philadelphia, 
Annapolis, Charleston. By 1660 (that is, by the end of the 
first half century), when the first frontier had been trans- 
formed into settled areas, a second thin frontier had pushed 
on fifty or a hundred miles farther inland, to the eastern foot- 
hills of the Appalachians. Here, during the next half cen- 
tury, at the head of navi- 
gation, and on sites of 
abundant water power, ap- 
peared a second line of 
towns, — Trenton, Prince- 
ton, Richmond, Raleigh, 
Columbia, — growing out of 
early stations for the fur 
trade. So far, frontier had 
kept in touch with settled 
area. But, about 1700, a 
third frontier leaped the 
first range of mountains, 
into the long, narrow valleys 
running north and south be- 
tween the Alleghenies and 
the Blue Ridge, leaving a 
hundred miles of tangled 
wilderness between itself and civilization. This region was 
the beginning of a new "section" in our history. It was 
^. „ . our iirst ''West." Moreover, it was made by a 

The Scotch- •' „ . . i i -r. i • 

Irish and ucw type ot American settler, the Presbyterian 
?,"i,^^*,, Scotch-Irish. These were really neither Scotch 

West . . . 

nor Irish in blood, but Saxon English. For cen- 
turies their fathers had lived in the Lowlands of Scotland 
as frontiersmen against the Celtic Scots of the Highlands. 
In the reigns of Elizabeth and James they had colonized 
northeastern Ireland, — frontiersmen against the Catholic 
and Celtic Irish. But after the English Revolution, the new 
navigation laws crushed their linen manufactures, — the 
chief basis of their prosperity there, — and the English 




The Watercourse Fall Line. 



THE SCOTCH-IRISH AND THE WEST 135 

laws against the Irish CathoHcs bore heavily also upon these 
Presbyterian "dissenters" from the English Church. So, 
about 1700, with hearts embittered toward England, they 
began once more to seek new homes, — this time in America. 
In both Scotland and Ireland there had been some mixture 
of blood, but the dominant strain was still English. 

The volume of this immigration increased rapidly, and it 
has been estimated that between 1720 and 1750 it amounted 
to an average of 1'2,000 a year. In numbers and in sig- 
nificance, the Presbyterian English of the West rank in our 
nation-making alongside the Episcopalian English of Vir- 
ginia and the Congregational English of New England. 

The Scotch-Irish came to America mainly through the 
ports of Philadelphia in the north and Charleston in the 
south. Many stopped in the settled areas ; but a steady 
stream passed on directly to the mountains and over them. 
Reaching the Appalachian valleys in the far north and south, 
the two currents drifted toward each other, until they met 
in the Shenandoah valley in western Virginia. And thence, 
just before the American Revolution, under leaders like 
Boone and Robertson, they began to break through the 
western wall, to make a fourth frontier at the western foot- 
hills and farther west, in what we now call Kentucky and 
Tennessee. Until about 1850, the Scotch-Irish were the 
typical American frontiersmen, especially in the great middle 
West and Southwest. They showed a marvelous power to 
assimilate other elements that mingled with them, — Ger- 
man, French, Welsh, and even the real Irish and real Scotch, 
when these came, in small numbers, just before the Revolu- 
tion. They have furnished, too, many leaders to our national 
life, — such as Andrew Jackson and "Stonewall" Jackson, 
Horace Greeley, Jefferson Davis, Patrick Henry, William 
McKinley, Woodrow Wilson. 

Unlike the country east of the mountains, this new 
"West" had its real unity from north to south. Politically, 
it is true, the settlers were divided by the old established 
colonial boundary lines, running east and west ; but, from 



136 "COLONIAL AMERICANS," 1690-1763 

New York to Georgia, the people of this new frontier were 
one in race, religion, and habits of life, — hard, dogged farm- 
ers, reckless fighters and hunters, tall and sinewy of frame, 
saturnine, restless, dauntless of temper. Other immigrants 
to the New World had forced themselves into the wilder- 
ness, for high reasons, with gallant resolution, against 
natural inclination (page 69). But these men loved the loild 
for itself. Unorganized and uncaptained, armed only with 
ax and rifle (in the use of which weapons they have never 
been excelled), they rejoiced grimly in their task of subduing 
a continent. First of American colonists, too, did they in 
earnest face away from the Old World in their thought, 
and begin to look west toward the glorious destiny of the 
new continent. 

From 1689 to 1763, with only short pauses for breath, 
France and England wrestled for the splendid prize of the 
Mississippi valley. This incessant war with the 
with France French and their dread Red allies made a somber 
for the cen- background for all other movements in the Eng- 
lish colonies. It was never for a moment to be 
forgotten by the daring frontiersman who shifted his home 
in search of better and cheaper land, or by the Assembly- 
man who wrangled with a royal governor for larger self- 
government . 

For the most part the campaigns were fought on European 
fields ; but at bottom the conflict was not determined on the 
battlefield. Two systems of colonization were at war in 
America, and free individualism won over despotic cen- 
tralization (page 12). A French governor could wield 
effectively all the resources of New France, — though this 
advantage was offset in part by the corruption that always 
threatens such a system ; while among the English, dissen- 
sions between colony and colony, and, within a given 
colony, between governor and Assembly, many times cost 
dear. But in the long run, the autocratic governor 'proved no 
match for the democratic town meeting. Had the French ever 
succeeded in seizing Boston, they could never have held it 



WARS WITH FRENCH AND INDIANS 137 

— not even as long as King George did a few years later. 
On the other hand, the English needed only one decisive 
victory. For, despite the noble patriotism of a few great 
French leaders, the mass of French colonists had too little 
political activity to care greatly what country they belonged 
to, provided only they were treated decently. 

The closing cliapter of the struggle was "the Great 
French War" of 1754-1763, often called the "French and 
Indian War." Here the interest centers around two heroic 
antagonists, Montcalm and Wolfe. England's command of 
the seas made it impossible for France to send Montcalm 
the reinforcements he pled for ; and Wolfe's vie- Treaty of 
tory at Quebec settled forever the fate of the con- ^'^^^ 
tinent. By the final treaties of 1763, England received 
Florida from Spain, and Canada and the eastern half of the 
Mississippi valley from France. The rest of the valley 
France ceded to her ally Spain, and, except for some West 
India islands, she ceased herself to he an American jpower. 
North America was left to the vigorous English common- 
wealths and to decaying Spain, with a dividing line, tempo- 
rarily, at the great central river. The continent was des- 
tined to be English in speech and civilization. 

In internal development the seventy years from the 
English Revolution to the American Revolution have been 
called "a forgotten half century." There are Political de- 
no })rilliant episodes, no heroic figures, and no veiopment 
new principles. Much was done, however, in extending in-' 
stitutions already established. The central theme is the 
continuance of that inevitable conflict that appeared in the 
preceding period (page 132). Under the pressure of cease- 
less war, England felt, even more keenly than before, the 
need of controlling her colonies ; and the colonies, realizing 
dimly their growing strength, felt more and more their 
right to regulate their own affairs. 

The projects of the English government to extend its 
influence in the colonies had two phases, commercial and 
political. 



138 "COLONIAL AMERICANS," 1690-1763 

1. Several new Navigation Acts extended the old commer- 
cial policy of the home country. To the "enumerated 
New Navi- articles " to be exported only through England, rice 
gationActs ^y^s added in 1706, and copper, naval stores,^ and 
beaver skins in 1722. More important was a new kind of 
restriction upon American industry, — a series of attempts 
to restrict or prohibit manufactures. In 1696, a parliament 
of William III forbade any colony to export, even to Eng- 
land or to any other colony, any woolen manufacture. In 
1732, exportation of hats ^ was forbidden. Legislation of 
this sort had no such excuse as the earlier navigation laws. 
The motive now was plain jealousy on the part of English 
manufacturers . 

Bad as this was, the restrictions upon manufacturing so 
far were indirect : no colony had been forbidden to make 
Restrictions any article for its own consumption. But in 1750 
on industry (almost at the close of the period) the erection or 
use of iron mills urns prohibited altogether. Unlike the un- 
pleasant features of the earlier commercial restrictions, too, 
this law could not be evaded. The half dozen iron mills that 
had appeared in the northern colonies were closed, and all 
manufacture of iron ceased, except for nails, bolts, and the 
simpler household and farm implements, such as in that 
day were turned out at the village smithy. These English 
laws of 1696, 1732, and 1750 were selfish and sinister, — the 
most ominous feature in all American colonial history. 
They must have become bitterly oppressive ere long, had 
the colonists continued under English rule ; and at the 
time they fully deserved the condemnation visited upon them 
by the English economist, Adam Smith : "Those prohibitions 
are only impertinent badges of slavery, imposed upon [the 
colonies] without sufficient reason by the groundless jealousy 
of the manufacturers of the mother country." Unhappily 
the colonists seem to have felt aggrieved quite as much by 

^ England compensated the colonies by paying generous bovnties upon such materials 
sent to her. 

^ Making hats from t)(>aver skins had been a prominent industry in some northern 
colonies and in Pennsylvania. 



ENGLISH CONTROL VS. SELF-GOVERNMENT 139 

the well-intended, if not always tactful, efforts of England 
to preserve American forests from careless and greedy 
destruction, and to prevent the issue of dishonest colonial 
paper money. 

Another source of justifiable irritation was the "Sugar 
Act" of 1733, imposing duties on sugar and molasses from 
"foreign plantations" so high as to prevent the The Sugar 
colonists from getting these articles any longer ^^* °^ ^'^^^ 
from the French West Indies, except by smuggling. The 
purpose of the law was to compel the colonies on the con- 
tinent to buy their sugar from another English colony, 
Jamaica, where the sugar planters were in financial distress : 
it aimed to take from the mass of American colonists for 
the benefit of a specially privileged class of colonists. The 
law was suggested by a Boston merchant who owned plan- 
tations in Jamaica. 

2. Attempts by the English government at closer political 
control first took the form of efforts to make colonies into 
royal provinces. For sixty years Virginia had been ^j^^ change 
the only royal province. In 1685 New York was to royal 
added to this class, when its proprietor became p''^^'^^®^ 
king. William III, at the opening of his reign, made Mas- 
sachusetts practically a royal government (page 118), and, 
by a stretch of authority, he cut off New Hampshire from 
Massachusetts and gave it also that kind of government. 
Then came a series of attem])ts to change all colonies into 
royal provinces. In the remaining charter and proprietary 
colonies the Board of Trade found many just grounds for 
complaint. Besides the old offenses (evasion of navigation 
laws, refusals to permit appeals to England, and discrimina- 
tion against the English Church), the Board was annoyed 
by Rhode Island's stubborn persistence in a shameful trade 
with pirates ; by the refusal of Connecticut to let royal 
officers command her militia in war against the French ; 
and by the absence in Pennsylvania and New Jersey of all 
militia. Experience had shown that English courts could 
not be depended upon to annul colonial charters (pages 74, 



140 "COLONIAL AMERICANS,' 1690-1763 

118), and so, in 1701, the Board recommended, in a strong 
paper, that the eight charter and proprietary governments 
be "reunited" to the crown hy act of parliament. A bill 
to this effect passed two readings, with little opposition ; 
but the hurried departure of King William for a campaign 
in Ireland forced a timely adjournment of parliament. The 
following year another bill was being prepared, when the 
death of the King compelled parliament to dissolve. In the 
next reign these efforts were renewed. But time had been 
given for the proprietors in England and the charter govern- 
ments in America to rally all their influences, public and 
secret. The Whigs in parliament had great respect for 
charters and for "vested rights" ; and the movement came 
to nothing. 

The English government then fell back upon the early 
policy of William III, and attacked colonial grants one hy 
one, as occasion offered. Before 17.'30, by taking advantage 
of a legal flaw, a serious disorder, or of the willingness of an 
embarrassed proprietor to sell, it added New Jersey and 
North and South Carolina to the list of royal provinces. 
Out of the last named, Georgia was carved for a proprietary 
province a little later ; but it, too, soon came under a royal 
government. Down to the Revolution Maryland and Penn- 
sylvania remained proprietary, and Connecticut and Rhode 
Island remained "corporate" colonies. 

The common distinction between royal, proprietary, and 
charter colonies is not of great consequence. Connecticut 

and Rhode Island did keep tlieir right to elect all 
foioidar branches of their government. Pennsylvania, not 
contrasts classed as a charter colony, possessed, through its 
nesses^ grant from Penn, the next freest constitution, in 

the security of its legislature from interruption. 
Massachusetts, with its charter, had less valuable privileges, 
and resembled a royal province in all practical respects. 
But the really important thing about the colonial governments 
was their resemblances. All had representative Assemblies, 
with no small degree of control over their governors, and 



ENGLISH CONTROL VS. SELF-GOVERNMENT 141 

all had the private rights of Englishmen, — jury trial, free 
speech, freedom from arbitrary imprisonment, — which were 
not then found in the colonies of any other country. 

The next step in the new colonial policy was to attempt 
closer control in the charter and proprietary colonies : (1) to 
require royal approval for the appointment of pro- 
prietary governors ; ('2) to place the militia of ^^^^H^ *^°°" 
charter colonies under the command of a neigh- charter and 
boring royal governor; (3) to set up appointed coionies^'^^ 
admiralty courts, without juries, so as to prevent 
evasion of . the navigation laws ; (4) to compel colonial 
courts to permit appeal to the privy council in England ; 

(5) to enforce a royal veto upon colonial legislation ; and 

(6) to free royal and proprietary governors from dependence 
upon colonial Assemblies. The last two points require some 
explianation. 

(a) In theory, the king always possessed a veto, just as 
in parliament ; but, even in Virginia, so early a royal colony, 
he rarely exercised it until after Bacon's Rebellion, jj^^ ^^^^^ 
Thereafter, it was expressly reserved in all colo- veto on 
nial grants (as in that to Penn and in the Massa- ^° °^^ *^^ 
chusetts charter of 1691), and the right was emphasized in 
every commission to a governor of a royal province. True, 
a colonial law went into effect pending adverse royal de- 
cision ; but the veto was no mere form. Scores of important 
statutes were disallowed, sometimes after they had been in 
force for years. Fifteen Massachusetts laws of 1692 were 
vetoed in 1695, and eight statutes of North Carolina as late 
as 1754. 

(6) Even in a royal province, the governor often showed 
little desire to carry out English instructions that conflicted 
with colonial views. Partly, this was because the 
governor, living in close touch with the colonists, ^^ ^^^ ^l^ ^ 
ivas likely to see their side of the case; but more salaries 
commonly it was because his salary depended upon goygrnor 
his keeping up a good understanding with the colo- 
nial legislature. Every governor, in the words of a colo- 



142 "COLONIAL AMERICANS," 1690-1763 

nist, had "two Masters, one who gives him his commis- 
sion, and one who gives him his Pay." If the Assembly 
passed a bill distasteful to the home government, the 
governor could veto it ; but the Assembly might then cut 
down his salary, or leave it altogether out of the vote of 
supply, — which, according to good English custom, was 
always the last business of the session. To free the governors 
from this dependence upon the popular will, the English 
government tried for many years, in vain, to secure from the 
Assemblies a standing grant for such salaries. In 1727, 
Burnet, governor of Massachusetts, laid before the Assembly 
his instructions to secure from that body a fix^d grant of 
£1000 a year. Refusal, he said, would be taken by the King 
as "a manifest mark of undutiful behavior." On the other 
hand, a Boston town meeting bluntly called upon the As- 
sembly "to oppose any bill . . . that may in the least 
bear upon our natural rights and charter privileges, ivhich, 
we apprehend, the giving in to the King's instructions icould 
certainly do.'' Burnet was popular, as well as able; and 
the Assembly voted him not £1000, but £1700, /or one year. 
The governor indignantly refused to be "bribed" into prov- 
ing false to his instructions. The Assembly raised their 
offer, still in vain. For three years the struggle continued. 
Then a new governor, in want of money, petitioned the 
crown to allow him to receive the annual grant temporarily. 
The English government assented, and Massachusetts had 
won. 

To the credit of the monarchs, no attempt was made, in this 
long contest, to suppress any colonial Assembly. Indeed, 
Colonial while the English government did in some re- 
gains spects extend its powers in the colonies, still the 
Assemblies also made substantial gains. Everywhere the 
elected Houses claimed the powers and privileges of the 
English House of Commons. Especially did they get more 
control over finances. After long struggles, they shut out 
the appointed Councils from any authority over money 
bills (just as in England the House of Lords was no longer 



GAIN FOR FREE SPEECH 143 

permitted to amend or reject bills of supply), and, in each 
colony, they created a Treasurer, not apjjointed by the 
governor, })ut elected by the Assembly. 

This step grew out of an earlier practice of occasionally 
making the Speaker of the Assembly the guardian of funds 
appropriated for some particular purpose. Sometimes an 
Assembly encroached upon the authority of the royal 
governor even further, by turning over executive functions 
to commissions appointed by itself. In this appearance of 
new officers alongside the governor, we have the germ of 
the character of our later State executives in America, — 
several heads (governor, auditor, treasurer, etc.), each in- 
dependent of the others. This is by no means the only 
case where a movement essential to liberty in one era has 
burdened later times with an unsatisfactory heritage. 

Private rights, too, were more clearly defined. With the 
approval of the crown lawyers, the doctrine was established 
that the Common Law of England, with all its ^j^^ English 
emphasis on personal liberty, was also the com- Common 
mon law of the colonies even urithout express en- ^ 
actment. And at least one advance was made in the col- 
onies over English custom in the matter of personal liberty 
— namely, a greater safety for a free press. 

In 1735 a tyrannical governor of New York removed the 
chief justice of the colony from office for personal reasons. 
John Zenger in his Weekly Journal published vig- ^ ^^^^ 
orous criticism of this action, declaring that, if press: the 
unchecked, it threatened slavery to the people. ^'^^^ "* 
Zenger was prosecuted for criminal libel. In England at 
that day such a prosecution, backed by the government, 
was sure of success. In New York, the new chief justice, 
too, showed a determination to secure a conviction. He 
tried to limit the jury to deciding only whether Zenger was 
responsible for the publication (a matter not denied), re- 
serving to himself the decision whether the words were 
punishable. This was the custom of English courts in such 
cases to a much later period. But Zenger's lawyer in a 



144 "COLONIAL AMERICANS," 1690-1763 

great speech argued that pubhc criticism is a necessary 
safeguard for free government, and that, to prevent the 
crushing out of a legitimate and needed criticism, the jury 
in such a trial must decide whether the words used were 
libelous or true. This cause, said he, is "not the Cause 
of a poor Printer alone, nor of New York alone," but 
of "every free Man on the Main of America." He called 
upon the jury to guard the liberty "to which Nature 
and the Laws of our Country have given us the Right, — 
the Liberty of exposing and opposing arbitrary Power 
(in these parts of the World at least) by speaking and 
writing the Truth." " A free people,'' he exclaimed bluntly, 
"are not obliged by any Law to support a Governor who goes 
about to destroy a Province. '' The jury insisted upon this 
right, and declared Zenger "Not guilty." Gouverneur 
Morris afterward styled this acquittal "the morning star 
of that liberty which subsequently revolutionized America." 

The whole constitutional conflict outlined in this chapter 
was one of the chief preparations for the Revolution ; and 
Preparation ^^^^ training secured by the colonists in these 
for the struggles explains the skill with which they waged 

Revolution ^j^^ j^^^ opposition to George III, from 1760 to 
1775, before the contest became open war. The English 
historian, Doyle, says of the period 1690-1760: "The 
demands made upon the colonists, [and] the restrictions 
imposed upon them, were often in perfect conformity 
with equity and reason. [But] it can seldom be said that 
the method of enforcement [by England] teas sympathetic, 
or even intelligent. . . . The temper of mind, the habits 
of thought and action, which made successful resistance 
possible [at the time of the Revolution] had their origin 
in these disputes, which had kept alive an abiding spirit of 
bitterness and vindictiveness between the colonists and those 
set in authority over them, and had furnished the former with 
continuous training in the arts of political conflict." 



CHAPTER VIII 

COLONIAL LIFE 

Before we pass to the separation from England, it remains 
to gather up a number of topics vitally related to colonial 
life, which have not fitted into our brief chronological 
story. Some of these have to do mainly with peculiarities 
due to existence on a distant frontier ; some belong essen- 
tially to the age. 

1 . Much colonial legislation goes under the name of Blue 
Laws. The term signifies either undue severity in punishing 
ordinarv crime, or unreasonable interference with ., „, 

•^ Blue 

personal liberty. In the first sense, — that of Laws " 
bloody laws, — the colonists could not be blamed ^^ ^^^ 
by Europeans of their day. Everywhere, life was 
still harsh and cruel ; but American legislation was more 
humane and rational than that of England or France. 
True, many barbarities did survive. The pillory and whip- 
ping post, with clipping of ears, were in universal use. As 
late as 1748, a Virginian law required every parish to have 
these instruments ready, and suggested also a ducking 
stool for "brabbling women." Prison life was unspeakably 
foul and horrible. Death was the penalty for many deeds 
not now considered capital crimes in any civilized land ; 
and many punishments seem to us ingeniously repulsive, 
such as branding for robbery or other crimes. (In nearly 
any part of the world outside New England the Hester 
of Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter would have borne the shame- 
ful insignia of her sin, not worked upon her dress, but 
burnt upon her flesh.) When the colonies were growing up, 
there were over fifty offenses punishable with death in Eng- 
land. This number increased to about two hundred before 
the "sanguinary chaos" was reformed in the nineteenth 

145 



146 COLONIAL LIFE 

century. Not more than eighteen offenses were ever 
"capital" in New England. Virginia ran the number up 
to twenty-seven ; but in large part this was due to her 
cruel slave laws, which were rarely enforced. 

In the second meaning of Blue Laws, — that of inquisi- 
torial legislation, — New England comes in for just criticism. 
Not that she was much worse than the rest of the world even 
in that. To-day, as a rule, legislation aims to correct a 
man's conduct only where it directly affects other people ; 
but in that day, all over Christendom, the state tried to 
regulate conduct purely personal. This was because state 
and church were so closely connected. In Virginia, the 
colonial law required attendance at church, and forbade 
traveling on Sunday. In the Puritan colonies such legislation 
was more minutely vexing, — and more rigorously enforced. 
But even here the many laws against "immodest fashions 
and costly apparel " had to yield somewhat to the gentle 
Puritan mothers — as is manifest in a naive entry of Win- 
throp's in 1638 : — 

"The court, taking into consideration the great disorder general 
through the country in costliness of apparel, and following new 
fashions, sent for the elders of the churches, and conferred with 
them about it, and laid it upon them, as belonging to them, to 
redress it, by urging it upon the consciences of their people, 
which they promised to do. But little was done about it ; jor 
divers oj the elders' wives, etc., were in some measure partners in this 
general disorder." 

Moreover, the most common specific charges against New 
England are wholly false. It is still widely believed that 
in Connecticut the law forbade a woman to kiss her child 
on Sunday; that it prohibited playing on "any instrument 
of music except the drum, trumpet, and jewsharp"; and 
that it required "all males" to have their hair "cut round 
And Mr according to a cap." These "laws" are merely 
Peters' in- the iugeuious veugcance of a fugitive Tory clergy- 
ventions ^^^ ^^g ^ Peters), who during the Revolution 
published in England a History of Connecticut. The ve- 



THE DECAY OF PURITANISM 147 

racity of the Reverend Mr. Peters may be judged from 
other items in his History. He pictures the inhabitants 
of a Connecticut village fleeing from their beds, mistak- 
ing the croaking of an "army of thirsty frogs" (on their 
way from one pond to another) for the yells of an attack- 
ing party of French and Indians ; and he describes the 
rapids of the Connecticut River thus, — "Here water 
is consolidated without frost, by pressure, by swiftness, 
between the pinching, sturdy rocks, to such a degree of 
induration that an iron crow [bar] floats smoothly down its 
current!" This quaint book contains a list of forty -five 
alleged "Blue Laws." Some are essentially correct, and 
most have some basis in fact; but a few are the mere 
malicious inventions mentioned above, and it is by these 
almost alone that the "code" is generally known. 

2. Soon after 1650 there began a slow decay in Puritanism. 
The historian Freeman complains that students of history 
go wrong because they think that "afl the An- The three 
cients lived at the same time." Nor have all generations 

_ - 1 • 1 1 • X • °' Puritans 

the Moderns lived at the same time. It is essen- in the i7th 
tial to see the colonist of 1730 or 1700 as a "ntury 
different creature from his great grandfather of 1660 or 
1630. Even in the first century in Massachusetts, the 
three generations had each its own .character. The first 
great generation of founders (the leaders, at least) were 
strong, genial, tactful men, broadened by European culture 
and by wide experience in camp and court, and preserving 
a fine dignity, sometimes tender graces even, in their stern 
frontier lives. Their Puritanism was sometimes somber, 
but never petty. It was like the noble Puritanism of Milton 
in his youth, — the splendid enthusiasm of the "spacious 
Elizabethan days," sobered and uplifted by moral earnest- 
ness and religious devotion. Winthrop and Cotton and 
their fellows, who had left ancestral manor houses to dwell 
in rude cabins for conscience' sake, lived an exalted poem 
day by day in their unfaltering conviction of the Divine 
abiding within them and around them. But their children 



148 COLONIAL LIFE 

could not easily rise to this height. As early as 1646, the 
Massachusetts General Court laments the desecration of 
the Sabbath by ''youths and maydes" "uncivilly walkinge 
in the streets and fields . . . and otherwise misspending 
that precious time " ; and in the records of Watertown 
for 1669 we read, — "It was agreed that the selectmen 
shall take their turnes, every man his Day, to site upon 
the Gallary to looke to the youthes ... in the time 
of publike exercises on the Lords Days, and that the 
two Constables shalbe desired to take their turnes to site 
there also." 

Grown to manhood, these sons and grandsons of the 
founders laid aside frivolity, it is true, and became solemn 
and stern ; but they show Puritanism in the sere. The 
necessities of frontier life made them nimble-witted, in- 
quisitive, pushing, better able than their fathers "to find 
their way in the woods" and to rear crops and children 
under New World conditions. But the unceasing struggle 
and petty privations (theirs not by choice now, but by 
compulsion), made their lives harsh and unlovely and bitter. 
Most of the finer thought and broad outlook of the first 
generation fell away, and they had never felt its splendid 
self-sacrifice. Faith gave way to formula; inspiration was 
replaced by tradition and cant. The second generation 
lost the poetry out of Puritanism ; the third generation 
began to lose the power. Much that is vital to man always 
remained. Puritanism continued to teach the supremacy 
of conscience with emphasis never excelled in religious 
movements ; and, in its darkest period, sweet and gentle 
lives sometimes blossomed out of it. But before 1700 it 
showed a great decline. 

That decay was associated with a marked increase in 
gloom in New England life. Gloom had been an incident 
An increase of Puritanism in its best day : now it became so 
of gloom dominant as to distort religion. The damnation 
scene of Wigglesworth's Day of Doom was long the most 
popular "poetry" in New England. Two extracts may 
indicate its character for literature and for thought : — 



THE WITCHCRAFT DELUSION 149 

" They cry, they roar, for Anguish sore. 
And gnash their Tongues for horror : 
But get away without delay ; 
Christ "pities not your Cry. 
Depart to Hell : there you may yell 
and roar eternally. 

" God's direful Wrath their bodies hath 
Forever immortal made . . . 
And live they must, while God is just. 
That He may plague them so." 

Among these "damned," over whose fate the poet gloats 
in this way, he is careful to include all unbaptized infants as 
well as 

" civil honest men. 

That loved true Dealing and hated Stealing, 

Nor wronged their brethren," 

but whose righteousness had not been preceded by "effec- 
tual calling," in the grotesque phrase of the time. 

To modern ears this seems comic. But men of that day 
preferred Wigglesworth's ghastly doggerel to Milton; and, 
as Lowell says with biting satire, the damnation scene was 
"the solace of every Puritan fireside." 

3. Another phenomenon connected with the fanaticism of 
Puritanism in its worst age was the "Salem witchcraft mad- 
ness'^ of 169^. Throughout the seventeenth cen- xhe Saiem 
tury, all but the rarest men believed unquestion- witchcraft 
ingly that the Devil walked the earth in bodily ™^ ^^^^ 
form and worked his will sometimes through men and 
women who had sold themselves to him. These suspected 
"witches," ^ — -usually lonely, scolding, old women, — were 
objects of universal fear and hate. In Switzerland, Sweden, 
Germany, France, Great Britain, great numbers of such 
wretches were put to death, not merely by ignorant mobs, 
but by judicial processes before the most enlightened courts. 
In England, in 1603, parliament sanctioned this Common 
Law process by a statute providing the penalty of death 



150 COLONIAL LIFE 

for those who should have "Deahngs with evill Spirits." 
(This law remained on the English statute books until 1735 ; 
and in 1711 Jane Wenham was convicted under it of "con- 
versing with the Devil in the shape of a cat.") The New 
England codes contained similar legislation. In Virginia, 
Grace Sherwood was "swum for a witch" in 1705, and, in as 
much as she was not drowned, the jury declared her guilty ; 
but she escaped punishment through the enlightened doubts 
of the gentry Justices. In the more progressive Pennsyl- 
vania, the most that could be secured from a jury was a 
verdict against an accused woman of "guilty of haveing 
the Common fame of a witch, but not guilty as She 
stands Indicted." In Maryland a woman was executed on 
the charge of witchcraft. But most of the American per- 
secutions occurred in New England. Connecticut executed 
eleven witches, and about as many more suffered death in 
Massachusetts before 1690. Then came the frenzy at 
Salem ; and unthin a feiv months twenty ivere executed, while 
the prisons were crammed with many scores more of the ac- 
cused. The clergy took a leading part in the prosecutions ; 
and the hideous follies of the trials are almost incredible. 
While the madness lasted, the flimsiest accusations were 
equivalent to proof. One neat woman had walked some 
miles over bad roads without getting herself muddy: "I 
scorn to be drabbled," she said. Plainly she must have been 
carried by the Devil! And so "she was hanged for her 
cleanliness." 

Finally the common sense of the people awoke, and the 
craze passed as suddenly as it had come. With it closed all 
legal prosecution for witchcraft in New England, rather 
earlier than in the rest of the world ; but the atrocities of 
the judicial murders crowded into those few months stand 
a lasting, and needed, warning against popular frenzy. 

4. In the early eighteenth century the reaction against the 
witchcraft delusion, the general decline of Puritanism, and 
the influx of dissenting Baptists and Episcopalians into New 
England greatly lowered the old influence of the Puritan 



SCHOOLS 151 

clergy in society and in politics. There began, too, here 
and there, a division within Puritan churches, foreshadow- 
ing the later Unitarian movement. This loss of religious 
unity brought with it for a time some loosening of morals, 
and part of the people ceased to have any close relation to 
the church, — though all were still compelled to go to service 
each Sunday. 

About 1735 a reaction from the religious indifference of 
the day manifested itself in "the Great Awakening." The 
powerful preaching of Jonathan Edioards and the 
impassioned oratory of George Whitfield, one of Awaken- 
the founders of English Methodism, caused for a ^^^ " °^ 

1735 

time a powerful revival movement in America — 
characterized by the features that later movements of a like 
kind have made so familiar. 

5. Of the original immigrants below the gentry class, a 
large proportion could not write their names ; and for many 
years, in most. colonies except Massachusetts and 
Connecticut, there were few schools. Parents were 
sometimes exhorted by law to teach their children them- 
selves ; but all lacked time, and many lacked knowledge. 
Mary Williams, wife of Roger Williams, signed by her 
"mark." So, too, did Priscilla Alden in Plymouth; and in 
1636 the authorities of that colony excused themselves to 
critics in England for having as yet no school^ on the plea 
of poverty and the pathetic fact that "Divers of us take 
such paines as they can with their owne." The closing years 
of the seventeenth centuri/, in particular, were a period of de- 
plorable ignorance, — the lowest point in book education ever 
reached in America. 

With the dawn of the eighteenth century, and its greater 
prosperity, conditions began to improve. In Pennsylvania^ 
parents were required, under penalty of heavy fine, to see 
that their children could read, and several free elementary 
schools were established. In Maryland the statute book 
provided that each county should maintain a school, with 
a teacher belonging to the established Episcopalian Church ; 



152 COLONIAL LIFE 

but, since most of the inhabitants were Catholics or Protes- 
tant dissenters, the law was ineffective. In Virginia, in 
1671, Governor Berkeley had boasted, "I thank God there 
are no free schools here nor printing," and had hoped that 
for a hundred years the province might remain unvexed 
by those causes of "disobedience and heresy." Half a 
century later another governor of Virginia complained 
bitterly that chairmen of committees in the Assembly 
could not write legibly or spell intelligibly. But by 1724, 
twelve free schools had been established by endowments 
of wealthy planters, and some twenty more private schools 
were flourishing. South of that colony there was no system 
of schools whatever. Here and there, however, the churches 
did something toward teaching children ; and of course the 
wealthy planters of South Carolina, like those of Virginia 
and Maryland, had private tutors in their families, and 
sent their sons to colleges in their own or neighboring 
colonies or to the English universities. In New York, the 
Dutch churches had begun free schools ; })ut at a later time, 
because of the connection with the church, these almost 
disappeared. Massachusetts and Connecticut from the be- 
ginning had a remarkable system of public education 
(below) ; and the other New England colonies gradually 
followed in their footsteps. 

By 1760, though the actual years of schooling for a child 
were usually few, an astonishinqly large part of the population 
could read, — many times as large, probably, as in any other 
country of the world at that time ; but there ivas still dole- 
fully little culture of a much higher quality. Between 1700 
and 1770 several small colleges were established, in addition 
to the older Harvard (page 155) and William and Mary, in 
Virginia, 1696 : Yale, 1701 ; Princeton, in New Jersey, 1746 ; 
King's, in New York (now Columbia), 1754 ; the University 
of Pennsylvania (through the efforts of Franklin), 1755 ; and 
Brown, in Rhode Island, 1764. South of Virginia there was 
no educational institution of rank ; and none of the colleges 
just named equaled a good high school of to-day in cur- 
riculum, or equipment, or faculty. With a few notable 



I 



THE PURITAN SCHOOLS 153 

exceptions, the only private libraries of consequence were 
the theological collections of the clergy. In 1698 the South 
Carolina Assembly founded at Charleston the first public 
library in America, and about the middle of the eighteenth 
century Franklin started a subscription library at Phila- 
delphia. In 1700 there was no American newspaper. The 
Boston News Letter appeared in 1704, and, by 1725, eight 
or nine weeklies were being published, pretty well dis- 
tributed through the colonies. Ten years later, Boston 
alone had five weeklies. 

It should be noted clearly that in New England such 
education as there was, was open to all on fairly equal terms ; 
while south of Maryland, education, high or low, was 
practically only for the few. On the other hand, the great 
planters of the south were by all odds the best educated 
men in America, acquainted with literature, history, politics, 
and law, and with such science as the age had, and more or 
less in touch with European culture and habits of thought. 

The schools of early Massachusetts and Connecticut demand a 
longer treatment. Here was the splendor of Puritanism, — 
a glory that easily makes us forget the shame of the Quaker 
and witchcraft persecutions. The public school system 
of America to-day, in its essential features, is the gift of the 
Puritans. 

In Massachusetts, private schools were found in some 
villages from the building of the first rude cabins. In 1635, 
five years after Winthrop's landing, a Boston town meeting 
adopted one of these private schools as a town school, ap- 
pointing a schoolmaster and voting from the poor town 
treasury fifty pounds (some twelve hundred dollars to-day) 
for its support. So Salem in 1637, and Cambridge in 1642. 
Such schools were a new growth in this New World, suggested, 
no doubt, by the parish schools of England, but more 
generously planned for the whole public, by public authority. 
They were free in the sense of being open to all. Commonly 
they were supported in part by taxation, but tuition was 
charged also to help cover the cost. 



154 



COLONIAL LIFE 



So far, the movement and control had been local. Next 
the commonwealth stepped in to adopt these town schools 
and weld them into a state system. This step, too, was 
taken by the men of the first generation, — pioneers, still 
struggling for existence on the fringe of a strange and savage 
continent. In 1642, "in consideration of the neglect of many 

parents to train up their 
children in learning and 
labor, which might be 
'profitable to the Common- 
wealth,^' the General 
Court passed a Com- 
pulsory Education Act 
of the most stringent 
character. This law 
even authorized town 
authorities to take chil- 
dren from their parents, 
if needful, to secure 
their schooling,^ 

This Act assumed that 
schools were accessible 
in each town. Five 
years later, the com- 
monwealth required 
each village to main- 
tain at least a primary 
school, and each town 
of a hundred houses 
to keep up a grammar 
law of 1647 (written 
some dim way, the 
remains one of 
the destiny of 
delightful remi- 




Time cuts down al! 
Both great and {mall. 

L1rjfl&'ji>€3urfou'.Wife 
M»d: Bav'.d !cck ^i5 
Liff. 

Whaler in the Cea 
God's Voice ctiry. 



Xerxes tbe great i'ii 

die, 
And fo iT;ult you S.' t 

TdUtb {crwardjiip; 
Dcaih focrxll niv'i-, 

£•1:1 cliir;b Ihi Ixtt 



A Page from the Earliest Known Edition 
OF THE New England Primer, the first 
New England textbook not made up wholly 
of extracts from the Bible. The first edition 
appeared about 1680, and the book held its 
place until long after the Revolution. 

school (Latin school). This great 
with solemn eloquence, as if, in 
pioneers felt the grandeur of their deed) 
the mighty factors that have influenced 
the world. James Russell Lowell, after a 



^ The Puritan purpose was good citizenship, as well as religious training. The 
preamble of the similar Connecticut Act of 1644 runs: "For as much as the good 
education of children is of singular behoof and benefit to any Commonwealth," etc. 



I 



THE PURITAN SCHOOLS 



155 



niscence of the New England crossroads schoolhouse, con- 
tinues : — 

"Now this Httle building, and others like it, were an original 
kind of fortification invented by the founders of New England. 
These are the martello-towers that protect our coast. This was 
the great discovery of our Puritan forefathers. They were the 
first lawgivers who saw 



N'Z 



1 lay me down to deep, 
|)i-jy ihc Loid my foul to keep. 
If ! ni;;u!d die before I wake, 
1 pr^-.y the Lord my fuul to take. 
(iood children muft 
Ffjr Got! <fll day, Love Chrift alnaajfi 

Fa; crifj obey, hi Jccret pray, 

Xr f\i lie ll-niy fay, Mtrid littU play, 

i') ,:\'^j'.'j/i/.iy, Mtike no dilayy 

in ricirg good. 
Aivaice, aiifr, behold ihtiuliall, 
7 iy life, a leaf, thy breath, a blafl ; 
A I iiight lie down prenarM to hiive 
Thy fkep, tl'V death, rhv bed, thy grave- 



clearly, and enforced 
'practically, the simple 
moral and political 
truth, that knowledge 
was not an alms, to 
be dependent on the 
chance charity of pri- 
vate men or the pre- 
carious pittance of a 
trust-fund, but a 
sacred debt which the 
commomvealth owed to 
every one of its chil- 
dren. The opening of 
the first grammar- 
school was the open- 
ing of the first trench 
against monopoly in 
state and church ; the first row of pot-hooks and trammels which 
the little Shearjashubs and Elkanahs blotted and blubbered across 
their copybooks was the preamble to the Declaration of Independence.^'' 

The Puritan plan embraced a complete state system from 
primary school to ''university.'' In 1636, a year after Boston 
established the first town school, Massachusetts The Puritan 
established her "state university" (as Harvard ^^^^^ 
truly was in the seventeenth century, though it was named 
for the good clergyman who afterward endowed it with his 
library). Then the law of 1647 joined primary school and 
university in one whole, providing that each village of a 
hundred householders must maintain a "grammar-school, 
with a teacher able to instruct youth so as they may be 
fitted for the University.'' 



A Page from the Paisley Edition of the New 
England Primer, 1781. This "evening prayer" 
appeared first in the second edition of the Primer, 
nearly a hundred years earlier. 



156 COLONIAL LIFE 

True, this noble attempt was too ambitious. Grinding 
poverty made it impossible for frontier villages of four or 
five hundred people to maintain a Latin school ; and, 
despite heavy fines upon the towns that failed to do so, 
such schools gradually gave way, except in one or two large 
places, to a few private academies, — which came to repre- 
sent the later New England idea in secondary education. 
Thus, the state system was broken at the middle, and both 
extremities suffered. The universities ceased finally to be 
state institutions ; and the primary schools deteriorated 
sadly, especially in the period of Puritan decline about 
1700, with meager courses, short terms, and low aims. 
But with all its temporary failure in its first home, the 
Puritan ideal of a state system of public instruction was 
never wholly lost sight of in America. 

6. Population in 1775 numbered 2,500,000. One third 
had been born in Europe. The English nationality was 
Population dominant in every colony. In the Carolinas the 
in 1775 Huguenots were numerous, and in South Carolina 

and Georgia there was a large German population. South 
Carolina, too, had many Highland Scots. These came to 
America after the defeat at Culloden and the breaking up 
of the clan system. Curiously enough, they were Tories in 
the Revolution, The same conservative and loyal temper 
which had made them cling to the exiled House of Stuart 
in England made them in America adherents of King George. 
The largest non-English elements were found in the Middle 
colonies : Dutch and Germans in New York ; Dutch and 
Swedes in Delaware ; Germans, Welsh, and Celtic Irish in 
Pennsylvania. In the Carolinas, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, 
the back counties were settled mainly by the Scotch-Irish. 

In 1619, while Virginia was still the only English colony 
on the continent, she received her first importation of Negro 
Negro slaves, twenty in number. As late as 1648, there 

slavery ^g^e Q^ly 300 in her population of 15,000. By 

1670 the number had risen' to 2000 (out of a total of 40,000). 
A century later nearly half her population was Black, while in 



I 



FORCED LABOR 157 

South Carolina, more than half was Black. In Maryland the 
proportion was about a fourth, and in New York a seventh. 
Negroes made a fifth of the whole population, and half of 
that south of Mason and Dixon's line. That line divided 
the population of the coimtry into two nearly equal halves ; 
but hoo thirds of the Whites were found on the north 
side of it. 

7. Labor was supplied, in the main, by free men in New 
England, by indentured White servants in the Middle colonies, 
and by Negro slaves in the South. The White Labor in 
bondservants were of several classes. The man the different 
who sold himself into service for four or seven ^^'^^'^'^^ 
years in return for passage money for himself or his family, 
was known as a "redemptio7ier,'' or "free- wilier." The 
German immigrants of the eighteenth century, like many 
of the English settlers, came in this way. Many White 
convicts were transported from England and condemned 
to a term of service, — seven or fourteen years. After 
1717, this class increased rapidly in number, averaging 
1000 a year for the fifty years preceding the Revolution. 
Classed with the convicts in law, but very different from 
them in character, were the political "convicts," — prisoners 
sold into service by the victorious parties, each in turn, 
during the English civil wars of the seventeenth centurJ^ 
Often the convicts were not hardened criminals, but rather 
the victims of the atrocious laws in England at the time. 
Many were intelligent and capable. In Maryland in 1773 
a majority of all tutors and teachers are said to have been 
convicts. Some of them (like a much larger part of the 
redemptioners) , after their term of service, became 
prosperous and useful citizens. Even in aristocratic Vir- 
ginia, a transported thief rose to become attorney-general. 
Charles Thomson, Secretary of the Continental Congress, 
was a "redemptioner," as was also one of the signers of the 
Declaration of Independence. So, too, was Zenger (page 
143) ; and many members of colonial legislatures could be 
named who came to America as "bond servants." 



158 COLONIAL LIFE 

The condition of the White servants ivas often a deplorable 
servitude. The colonial press, up to the Revolution, teems 
White with advertisements offering rewards for runaway 

" servants servants. More than seventy such notices are 
contained in the "Newspaper Extracts" published in the 
New Jersey Archives for that little colony, for only the two 
years, 1771, 1772. This must have meant one runaway 
servant to each 1000 of the population ; and probably not 
half the runaways are in those advertisements. One run- 
away is described as ''horn in the colony,'''' about 50 years 



n^HIS Day run-away from his Marter 

Ahrah.irn A'lJerfsn cS- Kcit;-Mjri>!(l:e/><i, a white Man Servant, a- 
bout t6 Ycnrs of Agc» with fhort bro\vi\il"li ftrait Hair, he is p/etty 
clear (Itin'd, fom^thing freckled, and 1 think, on his left Foot the top of 
one of his middle Toe-i is cut off: He carried ofF \vi:h him a ttripcj 
v.'orUed and wocjI Jacket, two tuw and linncn Shirts, one pair o\ tow 
and linncn Trowfcrs, and one pair of tow and linren Ilrincd Breeches, . 
two pair of iigh;it"h coloured b'.ue Hi>ic, and a new Lallor Hat : His 
Name is Florence Syhcjlif a'/us Kid Cnrttr : Whcfocvcr fhall apprehend 
and rake up faid Fellow, and him deliver to his ahovefaid Mailer in , 
yeiv-M.crbhhcad, in the Conotv of ^sfi, or ia Qz^l. Jcjhua BrTiz,s in ' 
Tatmmth, lh:^ll h=»ve FOUR rOUNDS, lawful Money, as a Reward, 
«nd all necclfary Charges paid. 

.^u^uji 2 ;; . 1 7 ;; ^ . • Ahrabam AnderJcH, 



Advertisement from the Boston Weekly News Letter, September 18, 1755. A 
photograph of the original, which is in the collection of the Massachusetts 
Historical Society. 

old, and as having "served in the last umr [French War] and a 
carpenter by trade." There are still more significant and 
gruesome notices by jailers, proving that it was customary 
to arrest a vagrant working-man on suspicion of his being 
a runaway, and then, if no master appeared to claim him 
within a fixed time, to sell him into servitude for his jail 
fees! Some of these White "servants" are described as 
fitted with "iron collars." American law and custom per- 
mitted these barbarities upon the helpless poor in the days 
of Lexington and Bunker Hill. 

Negroes were not numerous enough in the North (except 



THE INDUSTRIES OF THE NORTH AND SOUTH 159 

perhaps in New York) to affect the hfe of the people seriously. 
In the South, Black slavery degraded the condition of the 
indentured White "servant," and — more serious The " Black 
still — made it difficult for him to find profit- ^^^^ " 
able and honorable work when his term of service had ex- 
pired. As early as 173.5, the result appeared in the presence 
of the class known later as "Poor Whites," In that year 
Colonel William Byrd declared that these "Ethiopians" 
"blow up the Pride and ruin the Industry of our White 
People, who, seeing a Rank of poor Creatures below 
them, detest work for Fear it should make them look 
like Slaves." In Virginia, as a rule, slavery was mild ; 
while in South Carolina and Georgia it was excessively 
brutal. In those two colonies the rice plantations called 
constantly for fresh importations of savage Africans. In all 
colonies with a large slave population there were cruel 
"Black laws," to keep slaves from running away ; and every- 
where the general attitude of the law toward the slave was 
one of indifference to human rights. The worst phases of 
the law were not often appealed to in actual practice ; but 
in New York in 1741, during a panic due to a supposed plot 
for a slave insurrection, fourteen negroes were burned at 
the stake (with legal formalities) and a still larger number 
were hanged, — all on very flimsy evidence. 

8. Dependence upon slave labor helped fo keep industry 
purely agricidtural in the South, since the slave was unfit for 
manufactures or for the work of a skilled artisan. 
Tobacco raising was the chief employment in the inTustrjT 
tidewater districts of Maryland, Virginia, and agricultural 
North Carolina, and rice cultivation in South export^ ""^ 
Carolina and Georgia. These tidewater staples 
were grown mainly on large plantations ; and the Virginia 
planter in particular sought to add estate to estate, and 
to keep land in his family by rigid laws of entail.^ Be- 
tween this class of large planters and the "Poor Whites," 

^ "Entail" is a legal arrangement to prevent land from being sold or willed away 
out of a fixed line of inheritance. Entail is found only with primogeniture. 



160 



COLONIAL LIFE 



however, there was always a considerable number of small 

farmers in Virginia ; and in North Carolina this element 

was the main one. The western counties of all the colonies 

were occupied exclusively in small farming. 

In the Middle colonies, foodstuffs were raised on a large 

scale. These colonies exported to the West Indies (both 

The Middle English and French) most of the bread, flour, 

colonies: beer, beef, and pork used there. In these col- 
foodstuffs . , . . , , . a ^ 

andmanu- ouies, too, unmigraut artisans trom (jermany 
factures early introduced rudimentary manufactures, — 
linen, pottery, glassware, hats, shoes, furniture. 




I 



An English C'uloxial-built .Schuoxer, The Baltic, coming out of St. Eustatia, 
Dutch West Indies, November, 1765. From a water color in the Essex In- 
stitute, Salem, Mass. 

In New England, occupations were still more varied. 
The majority of the people still lived in agricultural villages 

and tilled small farms ; but they could not wring 
occupations all their subsistence from the scanty soil. Each 
2fNe™. farmer was a "Jack-at-all-trades." In the winter 

days, he hewed out clapboards, staves, and 
shingles ; and in the long evenings, at a little forge in the 



TRADE AND INDUSTRY 



161 



fireplace, he hammered out nails and tacks from a bar of 
iron. Even in the towns, all but the merchant and 
professional classes had to be able to turn their hands 
to a variety of work if they would prosper. Mr. Weeden 
tells of a certain John Marshall, a constable at Braintree, 
and a commissioned officer in the militia company there, 
who "farmed a little, made laths in the winter, was painter, 
carpenter, and messenger, and burned bricks, bought and 
sold live-stock," and who managed by these varied industries 
to earn about four shillings a day. Manufactures also had 
appeared, though, with one exception, on a smaller scale 
than in Pennsylvania. The exception was shipbuilding. 
New England built 
ships for both American 
and English markets. 
With her splendid tim- 
ber at the water's edge, 
Massachusetts could 
launch an oak ship at 
about half the cost of a 
like vessel in an English 
shipyard ; and in 1775 
at least a third of the 
vessels flying the Eng- 
lish flag had been built 
in America. The swift- 
sailing schooner, per- 
fected in this period, was peculiarly a New England creation. 
Another leading industry was the fisheries, — cod, mackerel, 
and finally, as these bred an unrivaled race of seamen, the 
whale fisheries of both polar oceans. 

New England, too, was preeminently the commercial section. 
Her schooners — often from villages like Gloucester — carried 
almost all the trade between colony and colony for 
the whole seaboard. And in centers like Boston 
and Newport (as also in New York and Philadelphia in the 
Middle colonies) there grew up an aristocracy of great mer- 
chants (in the old English meaning of the word) , with ware- 




An American Merchant Ship, of the type 
known as " tall-masted " or " deep-sea going." 



Commerce 



162 



COLONIAL LIFE 




houses, offices, wharves, and fleets of tall-masted ships on 
every sea, and agents or correspondents in all parts of the 
Circles of world. One favorite circle of exchange was the 
exchange " three-cornered route": (1) New England mer- 
chants carried rum to Africa, to exchange for Negro slaves ; 
(2) these they sold largely in the West Indies for sugar ; and 

(3) this sugar they 
brought home, to make 
into more rum with 
which to buy more 
slaves. 

All the colonies im- 
ported their better grades 
of clothing and of other 
manufactures from Eng- 
land. The southern 
planters dealt through 
agents in England, to 
whom they consigned 
their tobacco. For the 
other colonies the circle 
of exchange was a trifle 
more complex. They 
imported from England 
more than they sold 
there. But they sold to 
the West Indies more 
than they bought, re- 
ceiving the balance in money, — mainly French and Spanish 
coins, — with which they settled the balances against them 
in England. 

This drain of coin to England was incessant through the 
whole colonial period. No coins were struck in the colonies, 
Exchange of course, except for the "Pine-Tree Shilling," of 
by barter Massachusetts ; and there were no banks, to issue 
currency. Trade was largely carried on, not by money, but 
by barter ; and in all colonies, especially in the first century, 
debts were settled and taxes were paid in produce {"pay") at 



• i ■. Li ,' • • ■• c ■, --It'. '1 i rc'.-r, -Jre MalTi -R ■ il---b ; - -■ ' 

.'.cr-rp-tcd Ly -J-.e- Jn-eTnrer ?.r.ciR.?:tLVeTJO 
'--'-- '■ t' ■ ■ ■^'■'''- '.■ !;> -r, vr. ilURiUcIs pd)- t:^it;-:3 



.-rf, -.- 



>h\. 



Massachusetts Paper Money of 1690. From 
a bill in the collection of the Massachusetts 
Historical Society. 



I 



THE THREE SECTIONS 163 

a rate for each kind fixed by law. Wages and salaries were 
paid in the same way. The following record of a vote by 
a Plymouth town meeting in 1667 hints at the difficulty 
of getting "good pay" in such a method: "That the 
sume of fifty pounds shalbee alowed to Mr. Cotton [the 
minister] for this present yeare (and his wood). To be 
raised by way of Rate [assessed as a tax] to be payed in such 
as god gives, ever onely to he minded that a considerable parte 
of it shalbee payed in the best pay.'' And toward the end 
of the colonial period a student at Harvard, afterward 
president there, paid his tuition with "an old cow." 

In the lack of a "circulating medium" (especially during 
the French and Indian Wars, when the governments needed 
funds), nearly all the colonies at some time after colonial 
1690 issued paper money. The matter was always paper 
badly handled, and great depreciation followed, ™°°®y 
with serious confusion to business. In consequence, the 
English government finally forbade any more such issues, to 
the great vexation of many people in America. 

9. The deep-lying differences between the three great 
sections of colonial America were suggested roughly by 
certain significant external appearances of their 
homes. The South had few toivns, — none south symbols 
of Baltimore, except Charleston. The ordinary °^*® 
planters lived in white frame houses, with a long 
porch in front, set at intervals of a mile or more apart, 
often in parklike grounds. The small class of wealthy 
planters lived on vaster estates, separated from neighbors 
by grander distances. In any case, a true "planta- xheSouth- 
tion,'' like a medieval manor, was a unit, apart fro)n empianta- 
the rest of the ivorld. The planter's importations *'°° 
from Europe were unladen at his own wharf, and his tobacco 
(with that of the neighboring small farmers) was taken 
aboard. Leather was tanned ; clothing for the hundreds of 
slaves was made ; blacksmithing, woodworking, and other in- 
dustries needful to the little community, were carried on, 
sometimes under the direction of White foremen. The mis- 



164 



COLONIAL LIFE 



tress supervised weaving and spinning, the master rode over 
his fields to supervise cultivation. The two usually cared for 
the slaves, looked after them in sickness, allotted their daily 
rations, arranged "marriages." The central point in the 
plantation was the imposing mansion of brick or wood, 
with broad verandahs, surrounded by houses for foremen and 
other assistants and by a number of offices. At a distance 
was a little village of Negro cabins. The chief bond with 




'^'-'m^/H^'p-^' 



nr7 I 



Mount Vernon, the home of George Washington, and a typical residence of a 
Southern planter. From a photograph. 

the outer world was the lavish hospitality between the 
planter's family and neighbors of like position scattered 
over many miles of territory. 

A wholly different society ivas symbolized by even the ex- 
terior of New England. Here the small farms were sub- 
The New divided into petty fields by stone fences, gathered 
England from the soil. All habitations clustered in ham- 
^* *^® lets, which dotted the landscape. Each was 

marked by the spire of a white church, and, seen closer, 
each was made up of a few wide, elm-shaded streets, with 



{ 



THE THREE SECTIONS 



165 



rows of small but decent houses in- roomy yards. And yet, 
even in New England, people were expected to dress accord- 
ing to their social rank; and inferiors were made to "keep 
their places," in churches and public inns. The clubroom 
and the inn parlor were for the gentry only : the tradesman 
and his wife found places in the kitchen or taproom. 

The symbol of the West was neither the broad-verandahed 
country mansion nor the town of elm-shaded streets cluster- 




l'h'i!,iiiraph by Elmer L. Foote 
Lexington Green, showing part of a New Englantl village, with typical homes 

of the better sort. The deeper interest of this picture is explained on page 

167, at the end of the chapter- 
ing about a white spire. Rather it was a stockaded fort, with 
scattered log cabins, in their stump-dotted clearings spotting 
the forest for miles about it. As early as 1660, in The West- 
Virginia, there was a difference noticeable between ^''^ stockade 
eastern and western counties. The great planters were not 
much attracted to the ruder frontier, and so the western dis- 
tricts were left almost wholly to a democratic society of small 
farmers. So in New England, by 1700, good land was scarce 
in settled districts, and town "free-holders" were less and 



166 



COLONIAL LIFE 




less willing to admit "cottagers" to rights of pasture on the 
town "commons." Accordingly, the more enterprising and 
daring of the landless men began to strike out for themselves 
in new settlements far up the rivers, — usually at some 
point where good water power suggested a mill site, and 
always where land could be taken almost at will. Long 
before the Revolution, men of New England birth had 
begun a newer and more democratic New England in the 
pine woods up the Kennebec and Androscoggin in Maine, 
along the upper course of the Merrimac in New Hampshire, 

in the Green Mountains 
of what was one day to 
be "Vermont," and in 
the Berkshires of Massa- 
chusetts — as about 
Pittsfield on the upper 
Housatonic. 

Meanwhile, farther 
west, beyond the first 
mountain range, in the 
long valleys from 
Georgia to New York, 
the Scotch-Irish were 
building the true West 
(page 135). No rivers 
made visits and trade possible for them with the older settled 
area — divided from it as they were by the bristling Blue 
Ridge ; and so here difference of race and lack of inter- 
course added to the earlier distinction between eastern and 
western districts. 

But in all the western regions, English or German or 
Irish, east or west of the Blue Ridge, compared with the 
The de- tidewater districts, there was little aristocracy, 
mocracy There were few large proprietors, few gentry, 
of the est ^^^ servants, almost no slaves. The gold lace 
and powdered wigs of the older sections were rarely seen, 
and only on some official from the eastern counties. Nearly 
every male settler was a free proprietor working his own 



"Boone's Fort," one of the early western 
"stations." Cf. page 244. From a print 
based on contemporary accounts. The struc- 
ture was 250 feet by 125, with heavy gates 
at the middle of the long sides. 



THE THREE SECTIONS 167 

land with his own hands, and eating and wearing the prod- 
ucts of his own labor. There were fewer schools and 
fewer clergy than in the older region ; and the hard condi- 
tions of life in the wilderness, and constant touch with 
savage enemies, developed a rudeness of manner and a 
ruthless temper. Both for good and bad, this new frontier 
had already begun in its own way to Americanize the old 
Europeanized frontier of the tidewater districts. 

N.B. Lexington Green, shown on page 165, has of course its 
deepest interest as the scene of the first bloodshed of the American 
Revolution. On their way to Concord (page 208), the British 
regulars found a few Minute Men drawn up here in front of the 
Meeting House (from the site of which this photograph is taken). 
Inspired by the spirit of free Americans and by the sturdy heroism 
of Captain Parker's exhortation (note his words upon the Me- 
morial stone), this little band stood its ground to a man, despite 
the British officer's order, " Disperse, you rebels," — and received 
a deadly volley. One of those who fell, the patriot Harrington, 
mortally wounded, dragged himself to his home (the house 
directly opposite), but died upon its steps while his wife was try- 
ing to assist him. Forever may men standing upon their rights 
but threatened by blustering tyranny remember the fine consti- 
tutional ring of Captain Parker's words, — " Stand your ground ! 
Don't fire unless fired upon. But if they mean to have a war, 
let it begin here." 



PART III— SEPARATION FROM ENGLAND 
CHAPTER IX 

THE CAUSES 

I. HOW THE FRENCH WARS PREPARED THE WAY 

The seventy years of Intercolonial wars closed in 1763. 
They had won for England a new colonial empire ; but soon 
it became plain that they had also put at hazard her old 
empire. They had prepared her colonies in North America 
for union, removed the need of her protection, and brought 
her to tax them. 

1. The common danger, during the long wars, had done 
much to bring the colonies together. In 1698 William Penn 
Projects for ^^^ew up a sclicme for colonial federation, and in 
colonial 1754, at a council of governors at Albany, Franklin 
umon presented his famous plan for union. Between 
these dates seven other like plans appeared, and leaders from 
distant colonies came together to consider some of them. 
True, the great majority of colonists everywhere ignored or 
rejected all such proposals ; but the discussion was to bear 
fruit when a stronger motive for union should arise. And 
without union, resistance to England would have been im- 
possible. 

2. The conquest of Canada removed the most pressing 
need of English protection. Far-sighted men had long 
English seen that the colonies might be less true to the 
conquest mother country if the dreaded French power 
o ana a sJ^^ould ccasc to threaten them from the north. In 
1748 Peter Kalm, a shrewd Swedish traveler, wrote : "It is 
of great advantage to the crown of England that the colonies 

168 



I 



HOW THE FRENCH WARS PREPARED THE WAY 169 

are near a country under the government of the French. 
. . . There is reason to believe the king was never earnest in 
his attempts to expel the French. ... I have been pubhckly 
told, not only by native Americans, but by EngHsh emi- 
grants, that within thirty or fifty years the English colonies 
may constitute a separate state, wholly independent of Eng- 
land. . . . These dangerous neighbors are the reason why 
the love of the colonies for their metropolis does not utterly 
decline." 

Probably, in the italicized sentence, Kalm had in mind 
the fact that, in King George's War (then just closed), the 
English ministry had refused to cooperate with the colonies 
for the conquest of Canada. In the "French and Indian" 
War Pitt threw aside this ignoble caution, and brought 
about the conquest. Even then, some Englishmen urged 
that England ought to restore Canada to France, in order 
to hold her old empire more securely ; and the French 
statesman, Vergennes, prophesied: "England will soon 
repent of having removed the only check that could keep 
her colonies in awe. They no longer need her protection. 
She 2vill call upon them to contribiite toward the support of 
burdens they have helped bring upon her ; and they will answer 
by striking off all dependence.^'' 

3. The colonies had been held to England by ties internal 
and external, — by affection and by foreign peril. The 
internal tie, however, had already been sapped, " writs of 
insensibly, by the large non-English immigration assistance" 
and by the long friction over Navigation Acts, paper money, 
royal vetoes, and governors' salaries (page 144). Now the 
external bond, too, was loosened, and a shock might jar the 
two halves of the empire apart. The Intercolonial wars led 
England to give this shock — first by her "writs of assist- 
ance" to enforce old laws, and then by new taxation, in the 
Sugar Act of 1764 and in the Stamp Act. 

The "writs of assistance" were used to enforce the old 
Navigation Acts with a new energy. This policy began 
with Pitt, during the French and Indian War. The original 



170 SEPARATION FROM ENGLAND 

purpose was, not to raise revenue, but to stop what Pitt 
indignantly and truly called "an illegal and most pernicious 
Trade ... by which the Enemy ... is supplied with 
Provisions and other Necessaries, whereby they are prin- 
cipally, if not alone, enabled to sustain and protract this long 
and expensive War J" The French armies in Canada and the 
French fleets in the West Indies were fed by provisions shipped 
to them from New England, at the very time that England was 
fighting desperately to protect New England against those 
armies and fleets. Many colonists confused this shameful 
trade with the ordinary smuggling which had long made parts 
of the navigation laws a dead letter. On the other side, the 
customs officials fell back upon remedies as bad as the evil. 
In 1755 they began to use general search warrants, known 
as "writs of assistance." This form of warrant had grown 
up in England in the evil times of the Stuart kings. It ran 
counter to the ancient English principle that a man's house 
was "his castle," into which not even the ofiicer of the law 
might enter without the owner's permission, except upon 
definite cause shown. Unlike ordinary search warrants, 
these new documents did not name a particular place to be 
searched or a particular thing to be searched for, nor did 
they make public the name of the informer upon whose 
testimony they were issued. They authorized any officer 
to enter any house upon any suspicion, and "were directed 
against a whole people." They might easily become in- 
struments of tyranny, and even of personal revenge by petty 
officials. 

When George III came to the throne, in 1760, all writs 
of the past reign expired. Accordingly, in 1761, a revenue 
And James officer at Boston asked a Massachusetts court to 
^**^ issue new "writs of assistance." It then became 

the place of James Otis, the brilliant young Advocate Gen- 
eral, to argue for them. Instead, he resigned his oflSce, and 
took the case against them. "Otis was a flame of fire. Then 
and there the child Independence was born." ^ He called the 

1 So wrote John Adams some years afterward. The other quotations in the 
paragraph are from notes taken at the time by Adams, then a law student. How 



HOW THE FRENCH WARS PREPARED THE WAY 171 

general warrants "the worst instrument of arbitrary power, 
the most destructive of English liberty and of the funda- 
mental principles of law, that ever was found in an English 
law book." He contended, he said, against " a kind of power, 
the exercise of which had cost one king of England his crown, 
and another his head. . . . No Act of Parliament can estab- 
lish such a writ. . . . An act against the constitution is void." 
This final argument is natural to Americans to-day, 
familiar as we are with the idea of a written constitution 
as Si fundamental law, to which all other law must conform. 
In England to-day such an argument would be almost im- 
possible, since there parliament has come to be so supreme 
that it can change the law and the "constitution" at will. 
In older English history, however, the Common Law and 
the great charters (especially in so far as they protected the 
rights of the individual) had been regarded somewhat as 
we regard our constitutions ; and in the time of Otis that 
view had not been wholly lost. It is in this old English 
sense that he uses the word "constitution." It is interest- 
ing to note that a few years later, the Court of the King's 
Bench adopted this view and declared general warrants in 
England unconstitutional. 

Otis lost the case, but his fiery eloquence roused the 
people to open the whole question of parliamentary control. 
Soon afterward, he published his views in two pamphlets 
which were widely read. "God made all men naturally 
equal,"" he affirmed. Government is "instituted for the 
benefit of the governed," and harmful government should 
be destroyed. Parliament he recognized as supreme (so 
long as it governed fitly), but he urged that the colonists, 
besides keeping their local legislatures, ''should also he 
represerited, in some proportion to their 7iumber and estates, 
in the grand legislature of the nation." 

profoundly the argument of Otis impressed America is seen from the fact that when 
Virginia in 1776 adopted the first written state constitution, the declaration of 
rights prohibited "general warrants" (page 214). This pro\'ision has appeared in 
nearly all our subsequent State constitutions, and it is found in the Federal Con- 
stitution (Amendment IV). 



17^ SEPARATION FROM ENGLAND 

In 1763, peace removed the especial need for writs of 
assistance ; and for a time the Americans forgot all past 
Grenviiie's irritation in their enthusiastic gratitude to Eng- 
pian to land for the conquest of Canada. But in a few 

tax America j^Qj^^j^g ^ j^^^ head of the English ministry re- 
opened all the old wounds. This was George Grenville, 
an earnest, narrow man, without tact or statesmanship, bent 
upon raising revenue in America. 

A strong case could be made out for that plan. The 
Intercolonial wars had made England the greatest world 
power ; but they left her, too, staggering under a debt such 
as no country to that time had dreamed of. The colonists 
were prosperous and lightly burdened. Eight millions of 
Englishmen owed a war debt of riinety dollars a head — in- 
curred largely in defending two million colonials, whose debt 
counted less than two dollars a head. Nor could the colo- 
nists excuse themselves on the ground that they had done 
enough in the wars. The struggles in America had been 
little more than scattered skirmishes, compared with the 
Titanic conflicts in the Old World. Pitt had declared that 
he would "conquer [French] America in Germany," and, 
with the aid of Frederick the Great, he did it. Even in 
America, England had furnished fully half the troops and 
nearly all the money — repaying each colony for all expense 
in maintaining its own troops when outside its own borders. 

In the Crown Point expedition of 1755 (before war was declared), 
the 3000 Colonials made the whole force ; and during the next 
year 4000 of the 5000 troops in the field were Colonials. But after 
England formally declared war, English troops plainly pre- 
ponderated. Amherst at Louisburg had only 100 Colonials among 
his 11,000 troops. At Quebec, Wolfe had 8500 regulars and only 
700 Americans — whom he described as " the dirtiest, most con- 
temptible, cowardly dogs . . . such rascals as are an encumbrance 
to an army." 

Still Grenville did not expect the colonies to pay any 
part of the debt already incurred by England. He meant 
only to have them bear a part of the cost of their own de- 



HOW THE FRENCH WARS PREPARED THE WAY 173 

fensefor the future. English statesmen agreed that, to guard 
against French reconquest and Indian outbreaks, it was 
necessary to keep ten thousand troops in America, p^^. ^njei-i- 
It was easy to find evidence that seemed to show can defense 
the need of such a garrison. Pontiac's War, the °^^ 
most terrible Indian outbreak the colonists ever knew, came 
just at the close of the French War, in 1763, and raged for 
more than a year, sweeping bare, with torch and tomahawk, a 
long stretch of western country. A few British regiments, 
left in the country from the preceding war, were the only 
reason the disaster was not unspeakably worse. For six 
months they were the only troops in the field. The Pennsylvania 
legislature, despite frantic appeals from the governor, de- 
layed to provide defense for its own frontier, — partly from 
Quaker principles, but more from a shameful dislike felt 
by the older districts for the Scotch-Irish western counties. 
The savages, having worked their will in that province, 
carried their raids across its southern border, getting into 
the rear of a small force with which George Washington was 
striving gallantly to guard the western frontier of Virginia. 
Washington's force, too, was for months altogether insuffi- 
cient for its task. His letters to the governor of Virginia 
complained bitterly of his need for reinforcements ; but 
the governor's earnest entreaties to the legislature for sup- 
plies bore fruit very slowly. Washington declared that he 
would have been wholly helpless for a long, critical time, 
had he not had under his command a small troop of English 
soldiers. 

But the colonists, quite in accord with old English preju- 
dice against a standing army in time of peace, had many 
times made it plain that their Assemblies would give no 
money to support one. Indeed they feared that such a 
garrison might sometime be used by a despotic government 
in England to take away their liberties. Accord- 
ingly Grenville decided to get the money for the ment of 
support of a garrison by taxing the colonists Navigation 
through parliament. (1) He would make the 
Navigation Acts a source of revenue, instead of merely a means 



174 SEPARATION FROM ENGLAND 

of benefiting English merchants ; and (2) he would raise 
money in America by internal taxes, — a thing never before 
attempted. In 1764 he ordered that the Navigation Acts 
be enforced rigidly ; and zealous revenue officers in America 
spread dismay and irritation by suddenly seizing many ships 
with cargoes of smuggled goods. Then, upon communities 
already angry and suspicious, fell news of a new tax law. 

This was the ''Sugar Act'' of 1764. The old Sugar Act 
of 1733 had tried to check the importation of sugar from the 
The Sugar French West Indies — in the interest of the Brit- 
Act of 1764 igjj West Indies (page 139), This law had never 
been enforced. The new "Sugar Act" (1) provided ma- 
chinery more efficient than ever before to enforce the 
whole system of navigation laws ; (2) revised those laws so 
as to raise more revenue ; and (3) forbade absolutely all 
trade with the French West Indies — which were a chief 
market for the products of New England and of the Middle 
colonies (page 162). 

The commercial colonies were angered and alarmed. They 
had never so feared French conquest as they now feared 
the loss of French trade. With every mail from America, a 
storm of protests assailed the ministry. But the Sugar Act 
did not directly affect the southern colonies; and therefore 
resistance to it could not arouse a united America. More- 
over, though this law did aim to raise revenue, still in form 
it was like preceding navigation laws, to which the colonists 
were accustomed. The leaders of public opinion needed a 
better rallying cry than it gave, to array the colonies against 
English rule. 

The Stamp Act gave this better opportunity. Early in 
1764, Grenville made the plan of this law public. Parlia- 
The Stamp ment promptly adopted resolutions approving the 
Act, 1765 plan, but gave the colonies a year more to pro- 
vide some other means for supporting a garrison, if they 
preferred. The colonies suggested no other plan, but they 
made loud protests against this one. In the fall of 1764 
the Sugar Act fell into the background ; and from colonial 
town meetings and Assemblies petitions began to assail the 



I 



INHERENT CAUSES 175 

ministry against the unconstitutional nature of the pro- 
posed Stamp Act. These communications Grenville never 
presented to parHament. In March, 1765, parliament 
enacted the law almost without discussion, and with no 
suspicion of the storm about to break. 

The Stamp Act was modeled upon a law in force in Great 
Britain. It required the use of stamps or stamped paper 
for newspapers, pamphlets, cards and dice, and for all legal 
documents (wills, deeds, writs). In a few instances, where 
the document recorded some important grant, the cost of 
the stamp rose to several pounds ; but, as a rule, it ranged 
from a penny to a shilling. Not a penny was to go to Eng- 
land. The whole revenue was appropriated to the future sup- 
port of an American garrison. 

Now came a significant change in the agitation in Amer- 
ica. Astute leaders seized the chance to rally public dis- 
satisfaction against England by appeals to the old English 
cry, — "No taxation without representation." In opposing 
the Sugar Act, the colonists opposed an immediate injury 
to their pocket books ; but, from 1765, they contended, not 
against actual oppression, but against a principle which 
might lead to oppression. "They made their stand," says 
Moses Coit Tyler, "not against tyranny inflicted, but 
against tyranny anticipated." The Americans surpassed 
even the English of that day in what Burke called their 
"fierce spirit of liberty." The freest people of their age, 
they were fit for more freedom, and they "waged a revo- 
lution for an idea." 

II. UNDERLYING CAUSES IN AMERICAN LIFE 

The English colonial system had guided and guarded the 
colonies while they needed help and protection. It was 
not tyrannical ; but it was sometimes selfish and American 
often short sighted, and it always carried the ^!^i.°"^J. 
possibility of further interference.^ True, until interference 

* Many shrewd observers (John Adams among others) believed that the Revolu- 
tion was caused largely by dread of ecclesiastical interference. Several times it 



176 SEPARATION FROM ENGLAND 

1764, actual interference had never been seriously hurt- 
ful. Often it had been helpful. But any interference was 
vexatious to a proud people, who now felt safe enough 
and strong enough to manage their own affairs. The 
The colonial Americans had oiitgrowri any colonial system pos- 
system sible ill that day. They were grown up. The 

outgrown tJ^^e had come for independence. " The crime of 
the British statesmen was that they didn't know a nation 
when they saw one." In one of his historical addresses 
Mellin Chamberlain puts the cause of the Revolution in a 
nutshell. Levi Preston was one of the minutemen of 
Danvers who ran sixteen miles to get into the Lexington 
fight. Nearly seventy years afterward, Mr. Chamberlain 
interviewed the old veteran as to his reasons that April 
morning. " Oppressions ? " said the aroused veteran ; " what 
were they ? I didn't feel any." " Stamp Act ? " "I never saw 
one of the stamps." "Tea tax.?" *'I never drank a drop 
of the stuff: the boys threw it all overboard." "Well, I 
suppose you had been reading Sidney or Locke about the 
eternal principles of liberty." "Never heard of them. We 
read only the Bible, the Catechism, Watts' Hymns, and 
the Almanac." "Then what did you mean by going into 
that fight.''" "Young man, what we meant in going for 
those redcoats was this : we always had governed ourselves, and 
we ahvays meant to. They didn't mean we should." 

And in growing up, America had grown away from England. 
If all of England had been picked up in the seventeenth 

century and set down, strung out along the thou- 
belween^the sand milcs of American coast from Maine to 
English and Georgia, its development during the next two 
American^ centuries would have been very different from 

what it actually was in the little European island. 
The new physical conditions would have caused a difference. 

had been suggested that England should establish bishops in America. Even 
the most strongly Episcopalian colonies, like Virginia and Maryland, resisted this 
proposal (needful as bishops were to the true efficiency of their form of church 
organization) because of the political power of such officers of the church at that 
time. After the Revolution a bishop, consecrated in England, was received with- 
out a murmur. 



INHERENT CAUSES 



177 




A Colonial Cartoon called forth by a proposal from Lord Hilsborough, Colonial 
Secretary, for sending a bishop to America. 



178 SEPARATION FROM ENGLAND 

But not all England had been transplanted, only certain 
selected people and selected institutions, — upon the whole, 
too, the more democratic elements. No hereditary nobility 
was established in America, and neither monarch nor bishop 
in person appeared in American society. No wonder, then, 
that by 1775 European English and American English could 
no longer understand each other's ideas. 

Both sections of Englishmen clung to the doctrine "No 
taxation without representation," but these words meant 
one thing in England and a very different thing in America. 
In England, since 1688, representative institutions had been 
shrinking, — becoming more and more virtual. In America 
representative institutions had been expanding, — becoming 
more and more real. The English system had become, in 
Macaulay's words, "a monstrous system of represented 
ruins and unrepresented cities." Many populous cities had 
grown up without gaining representation, while many decayed 
cities, perhaps without a single inhabitant, or with only a 
handful of voters (pocket or rotten boroughs), kept their 
ancient "representation." In reality, a small body of land- 
lords appointed a majority of the House of Commons, and 
many "representatives" were utterly unknown in the places 
they "represented." To an Englishman, accustomed to 
this system, and content with it, "No taxation without repre- 
sentation" meant no taxation by royal edict: no taxation 
except by the House of Commons, a "representative" body. 
Such an Englishman might argue (as Lord Mansfield did) 
that parliament represented Massachusetts as much as it did 
the English Manchester, which equally with Massachusetts 
was without votes for parliament. There were more men in 
England who were taxed and who could not vote than there 
were inhabitants in all America. Parliament virtually repre- 
sented the colonies, and therefore had the right to tax them. 
" V t " '^^^ argument was weak, even if representation 

representa- was to remain "virtual." Manchester, though 
tion and without votes, was sure to influence parliament, 
and to be understood by parliament, far better 
than distant Massachusetts. But the American was not con- 



INHERENT CAUSES 179 

tent with virtual representation : he was accustomed in 
his own colony to real representation. True, there were 
imperfections in the American system. Some colonies, 
notably Pennsylvania and the Carolinas, had been slow to 
grant a proper share in their legislatures to their own 
western counties. But, upon the whole, the electoral 
districts were about equal in population ; the franchise 
was extended far enough to reach most men with a little 
property ; and each little district chose for its repre- 
sentative, at frequent intervals, a man living in its midst 
and well known to the voters. To the American, "No 
taxation without representation" meant no taxation except 
by a representative body in his own colony, chosen under 
such conditions as these. In all this dispute the Englishman 
stood upon the old meaning of the phrase. The American 
stood for a new meaning, truer and higher, more in accord 
with future progress. 

The problem, however, was not merely about taxation : 
it was a question, also, of maintaining the unity of the British 
Empire, — the greatest free state the world had ^j^g problem 
ever seen. To preserve that state appealed to of imperial 
a noble patriotism on both sides the Atlantic. 
Most people, too, thought union with England essential 
to the very existence of the colonies. Plainly the separate 
colonies were too weak to stand alone ; and their union, 
except through England, seemed the wildest of dreams. 
During the past seventy years, colony after colony, for 
time after time, had been guilty of sacrificing the safety 
of a neighbor to sordid parsimony or to mean jealousy. 
Even James Otis wrote in 1765, — ^"God forbid these 
colonies should ever prove undutiful to their mother 
country. . . . Were the colonies left to themselves to-morrow, 
America would he a mere shambles of blood and confusion." 

Englishmen argued that the essential unity of the empire 
could be preserved only by recognizing a supreme power 
in parliament to bind all parts of the empire in all mat- 
ters whatsoever, including taxation. Americans confessed, 
gratefully, that union with England was "the source of our 



180 SEPARATION FROM ENGLAND 

greatest happiness'*; but they denied the authority of par- 
liament to tax them, and so were soon driven to deny any 
authority in parhament. The situation was new. Within 
two or three generations, England had been transformed 
from a little island state, with a few outlying plantations, 
into the center of a world empire. Within the same period, 
the relative power of king and parliament had shifted greatly 
in England itself. This change made necessary a new rela- 
tion between parliament and the colonies ; but just what 
that relation ought to be was not clear. 

Many colonists, who clung to the union while denying 
authority in parliament, were driven to a dubious doctrine. 
Theory of a '^^^ colonies, they said, were subject, not to parlia- 
" personal meut, but to the crown. The union between Mas- 
"'""^ sachusetts and England, according to this view 

of Jefferson and Franklin, was only "in the person of the 
sovereign," like the union between England and Scotland 
under James I. George III was king in England and king 
in Massachusetts ; but parliament was the legislature of 
the British Isles only, as the General Court was the legisla- 
ture of Massachusetts. 

In the argument over taxation, the Americans had the 
best of it, because they placed themselves upon modern 
conditions, ignoring dead theories. But in this second argu- 
ment, it was the Americans who clung to a dead theory. In 
earlier times there had been some basis for the doctrine of 
the crown's sovereignty in America. The colonies were 
founded upon "crown lands"; and the kings had tried to 
keep them crown estates. In those days, the colonists had 
been glad to seek refuge in management by parliament. 
During the Commonwealth, parliament exercised extensive 
control, and ever since, from time to time it had legislated 
for the colonies, — not merely in commercial regulations, 
but in various beneficent matters, as in the establishment 
of the colonial post office. Meantime, the English Revolu- 
tion of 1688 had made parliament supreme over the king. 
George III was "king in Massachusetts" only because he 
was king of England; and he was king of England only be- 



INHERENT CAUSES 181 

cause of an Act of Parliament. Indeed, had the king's power 
been real any longer, the colonists would never have ap- 
pealed to a theory of "personal union." The plea was a 
device to escape real control of any kind. 

To reconcile freedom and empire for the far-flung English- 
speaking world was hard indeed. How hard is shown no- 
where better than by the absurd contention to which the 
great Pitt was driven — that parliament might govern the 
colonies in all other respects but might not tax them, because 
"taxation is no part of the governing or legislative power.'' 
Almost equally absurd in that day, for all practical pur- 
poses, was James Otis' suggestion, approved by Franklin 
and by Adam Smith, that the colonies be given representa- 
tion in a reformed, imperial parliament. Steam and elec- 
tricity had not yet come, to annihilate the three Burke's 
months between Boston and London. The only p^^" 
promising solution of the problem, in accord with condi- 
tions of the time, was the one stated in the noble passage 
toward the close of Burke's oration on American taxation : — 

"I look upon the imperial rights of Great Britain and the 
privileges which the colonists ought to enjoy under those rights 
to be just the most reconcilable things in the world. The parlia- 
ment of Great Britain sits at the head of her extensive empire in 
two capacities : one as the local legislature of this island. . . . 
The other, and I think her nobler, capacity is what I call her 
imperial character, in which, as from the throne of heaven, she 
superintends all the inferior legislatures, and guides and controls 
them all, without annihilating any. ... It is necessary to coerce 
the negligent, to restrain the violent, and to aid the weak ... by 
the over-ruling plenitude of her power." 

Parliament, the orator continues, is not to intrude into 
the place of an inferior colonial legislature while that body 
answers to its proper functions; "but, to enable parliament 
to accomplish these ends of beneficent superintendence, her 
power must be boundless,''' — including even the power to 
tax, Burke adds explicitly, though he regards that as a 
reserve power, to be used only in the last extremity, as "an 



182 SEPARATION FROM ENGLAND 

instrument of empire, not a means of supply." That is, 
Burke would have had parhament recognized as possessing 
absolute power, in order that at need it might preserve the 
empire ; but he would have had it waive its authority in 
ordinary times in favor of the rights of the colonists to self- 
government through their local legislatures. Probably this 
plan would have been as nearly satisfactory as any solution 
of the problem then possible, if any union was to be main- 
tained. Adopted half a century later, it was to answer the 
needs of a greater English empire for eighty years longer. 
But to work Burke's plan called for tact and generosity, 
especially while the two parts of the English world were 
getting used to the new conditions. Neither tact nor gen- 
erosity marked Charles Townshend or Lord North ; and the 
clumsy machinery of government broke down. 

Even so, parliament let the ministry drive the colonists 
to rebellion only because parliament itself represented Eng- 
land only virtually. The contention between 
the Revo- King George's government and the colonies had 
lution to become intermingled with a struggle for the 
freedom reform of parliament at home. For some time 
the Whig leaders in England had demanded ve- 
hemently that the franchise be broadened and that parlia- 
ment be made really representative of the nation. If the 
demand of the Americans regarding taxation and repre- 
sentation were granted, then it would not be possible for 
the government much longer to refuse this demand for 
representation by English cities like Manchester. But this 
was just what conscientiously wrong-headed George III 
dreaded. He thought it his duty to recover the kingly 
power that had vanished since the English Revolution. 
To do this, he must be able to control parliament. The 
easiest way to control parliament was to pack that body with 
his own appointees from rotten and pocket boroughs. In 
a reformed parliament, this would no longer be possible. 
The King, therefore, was ready to force on a war against 
the American claim in order to shove aside the reform move- 
ment in England. 



INHERENT CAUSES 183 

The American Revolution, then, is seen imperfectly, if it is 
looked upon solely as a struggle between England and 
America. It ivas a strife of principles. It was a part of a 
thousand-year-long contest between the English-speaking 
people and their kings for more political liberty. In 1776 
the most advanced part of that people, politically, lived on 
this side of the Atlantic. The popular claims were made 
here, and the struggle was fought out here ; but in many 
ways the Revolution was a true civil war. Many Americans 
were not in favor of fighting, and many Englishmen were 
glad that America did fight. 

This feeling found expression even within parliament. 
The resolution of Patrick Henry declaring that the attempt 
to tax America, if successful, would result in the ^jjj 
ruin of British liberty also, was echoed by the sympathy 
great speech of William Pitt, when he "rejoiced" f°^ America 
that America had resisted, and declared that victory over 
the colonies would be of ill omen for English liberty : 
"America, if she fell, would fall like the strong man: she 
would embrace the pillars of the state, and pull down 
the constitution along with her." When troops were sent 
to Boston in 1774, the Earl of Rockingham and other 
Whig lords presented a protest to be inscribed on the jour- 
nals of parliament, and the Duke of Richmond broke 
out : " I hope from the bottom of my heart that the 
Americans may resist and get the better of the forces sent 
against them." Charles Fox spoke in parliament of Wash- 
ington's first defeat as "the terrible news from Long Island," 
and, in common with many Whigs, repeatedly called the 
American cause "the cause of liberty." As late as 1782, 
only four months before peace was made, the younger 
William Pitt asserted in parliament that if the House of 
Commons had not imperfectly represented the nation, it 
would never have been possible to carry on that "most 
accursed, wicked, barbarous, cruel, unjust, and diabolical 
war." Certainly the American, accustomed in our day 
to see popular intolerance of opinion suppress dissent even 
in legislative halls, should honor the English respect for 



184 SEPARATION FROM ENGLAND 

free speech, which compelled even the Tory government 
of George III to listen to such noble "treason." 

The American movement for independence was intertwined, 
too, with a social upheaval at home. This social unrest had 
four phases. 

1. In nearly all the colonies, a group of families — ^ pets 
of the crown or of the proprietor — monopolized office and 

special privilege. Other great families (like the 
revolution Livingstoucs and Schuylers in New York) felt 
in American aggrieved, and therefore were perhaps more in- 
clined to the movement for independence. 

2. The western sections of many colonies felt themselves op- 
pressed by the older sections. The inhabitants of the new 
™ .,^ ,, western counties sometimes differed from their 

The "East" ,,.,.. . , 

and eastern brethren in religion or even in race ; and 

]'West" they were not given their fair representation in 
the colonial legislature which taxed and governed 
them, — but which sometimes failed to protect them against 
Indians. In 1780 Thomas Jefferson declared that "19,000 
men below the Falls [in Virginia] give law to 30,000 in other 
[western] parts" of the colony. Sheriffs and other officials 
of the western counties, too, were often non-residents, ap- 
pointed from the eastern counties. Law courts were con- 
trolled by the older sections ; and in the western districts 
they met at long intervals and at long distances from 
much of the population. And fees exacted for court 
services and by all these appointed officers seemed ex- 
orbitant, and were sometimes made so by disreputable 
trickery. In 1763 a certain Edmund Fanning was ap- 
pointed Register for the county of Orange in western 
North Carolina. It was commonly reported that he was 
impecunious when he received the appointment, and that he 
accumulated £10,000 in two years by extortion. The 
"Regulators" in 1770 dragged him from a courthouse by 
the heels and flogged him ; and the following verses were 
current as early as 1765 : — 



INHERENT CAUSES 185 

" When Fanning first to Orange came, 

He looked both pale and wan ; 
An old patched coat upon his back, 

An old mare he rode on. 
Both man and mare warn't worth five pounds, 

As I've been often told ; 
But by his civil robberies 

He's laced his coat with gold." 

After several years of serious friction, the oppressed 
pioneers in North Carolina in 1769 set up a revolutionary 
organization known as committees of "Regu- jhe -y^rar 
lators," to prevent the collection of taxes. But of the 
the eastern counties, which controlled the legisla- ®^ ^^°'^^ 
ture, raised an army, and, in 1772, ended the "War of the 
Regulation" after a bloody campaign. The Regulation was 
not directed in any way against England, and must not be 
regarded as an opening campaign of the Revolution. In- 
deed, the militia that restored oppression was the militia 
which three years later rose against England ; and the de- 
feated "Regulators," refusing to join their past oppressors, 
in large part became Tories. But if the internal conflict 
could have been delayed three or four years, the Westerners 
would no doubt have dominated the Revolution itself in 
their State. 

That was what happened in Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania 
also was on the verge of civil war; but, happily, internal 
conflict was postponed long enough so that in the disorders 
of the general movement against England, the western 
radicals, with their sympathizers elsewhere in the colony, 
found opportunity to seize the upper hand. In Pennsyl- 
vania, the Revolution was a true internal revolution. Old 
leaders were set aside ; the franchise was extended to the 
democratic element; and a new reapportionment brought 
the democratic West into power. In most of the colonies 
north of the Carolinas, a like influence was felt in some 
degree, — notably in Virginia. 

3. Even in the older sections new men and a more democratic 
portion of society came to the front. Especially in the years 



186 SEPARATION FROM ENGLAND 

1774-1775, the weight in favor of resistance to English 
control was often cast by a "union of mechanics," as in 
Charleston and Philadelphia, against the wishes 
democratic of the more conservative merchants and profes- 
masses to sional men. And aristocratic patriots, like John 

new power , -pi p ii i i 

Adams, it they were not to tail, had to accept the 
aid not only of the artisans but even of classes still lower, 
— men who had not possessed a vote but who now, in times 
of disorder, often seized it. In many half-formal elections 
to early Revolutionary "conventions," the disfranchised 
classes voted, — sometimes on the explicit invitation of the 
Revolutionary committees, sometimes because it was not 
easy to stop them. Afterward, the new State governments 
found it hard not to recognize in some degree the power 
that had helped make them — especially as they continued 
to need that help. It was due largely to the nameless work- 
ingmen, and to the democratic frontier communities, that the 
internal "revolution'" widened the franchise somewhat and did 
away with the grossest forms of White servitude. 

4. Colonial Americans had been lazy. Critics so unlike 
as Hamilton and Jefferson agree in ascribing this quality to 
Demand their countrymen ; and all foreign observers dwelt 
for equal upou it as an American trait. But within forty 
oppo urn y yprj^j-g after the Revolution this characteristic had 
been replaced by that restless, pushing, nervous, strenuous 
activity which has ever since, in the eyes of all peoples, been 
the distinguishing mark of American life. One great factor 
in that tremendous and sudden change in a people's charac- 
ter was the Revolution, because it opened opportunities more 
equally to all, and so called forth new social energies. 

This transformation in American character was noticed 
as early as 1789. Said David Ramsey (History of the Revolu- 
tion, II, 315), "The necessities of the country gave a 
spring to the active powers of the inhabitants, and a vast 
expansion of the human mind speedily followed." This was 
America's answer to those doubters who thought the colonies 
must perish if left to themselves (p. 179). Not merely do 



INHERENT CAUSES 187 

new occasions teach new duties : new duties arouse new 
energies. At the stirring call of independence, the weak and 
divided colonies grew strong and united enough to protect 
themselves not merely without England but even against 
her. The men who foresaw this were radicals. They drew 
their conviction, not from the manifold discouragements of 
disreputable facts in colonial history, but from a broad survey 
of life and a profound faith in man and in their countrymen 
— from the evidence of things not seen. 

Englishmen of that day sometimes believed sincerely that 
the Revolution was the work of a group of "soreheads." 
George Washington as a youth had been refused a coveted 
commission in the British Army. Sam Adams' father had 
been ruined by the wise British veto of a proposed Massa- 
chusetts "Land Bank." The older Otis had failed to secure 
an appointment on the Massachusetts Bench. Alexander 
Hamilton was a penniless and briefless law student, with 
no chance for special advancement unless by fishing in 
troubled waters. 

All this, of course, as an explanation of the part played 
by Washington, Adams, Otis, and Hamilton, was as absurd 
as was the view of many Americans that high-minded men 
like Chief Justice Oliver and Governor Hutchinson of Mas- 
sachusetts were Loyalists simply in order to cling to office 
and salary. But had the British charge been true, what 
greater condemnation could be invented for the old colonial 
system than that, under it, George Washington could not 
get a petty lieutenant's appointment, and that a genius like 
Hamilton had practically no chance for advancement unless 
taken up by some great gentlemen ! 



CHAPTER X 

TEN YEARS OF AGITATION, 1765-1774 

The Stamp Act was to go into effect in November. The 
news reached the colonies in April and May. The colo- 
nists had done all they could to prevent the law 

The old „ 11-1 1 

leaders trom enactment ; but now that it was law, nearly 

and the ^\\ i\^^ q](J leaders at first expected it to be obeyed. 
Even Otis declared it to be the "duty of all 
humbly ... to acquiesce in the decision of the supreme 
legislature." And Franklin wrote home, — thinking chiefly, 
it would seem, of the money burden, — "We might as well 
have hindered the sun's setting. . . . Since it is down . . . 
let us make as good a night of it as we can. Frugality and 
industry will go a great way toward indemnifying us." 
Franklin even solicited the English government to appoint 
his friends as stamp distributors. 

But while the old leaders sought to reconcile themselves 
to the law, popular discontent was smoldering; and soon a 
new leader fanned it into flame. May 29, in the Virginia 
House of Burgesses (sitting in committee of the whole), 
Patrick Henry moved a set of seven resolutions denouncing 
the Stamp Act and urging resistance to it. 

Henry had appeared in the Assembly for the first time 
only nine days before; and in the "most bloody debate" 
that followed he was ridiculed by "all the cy- 
Henrys phcrs of the aristocracy." (Thomas Jefferson, a 
Resolutions youug law student, stood in the door, and has 
s,"^fn^e'^^' ^^^^ ^^ his later recollections of the struggle.) 
Through the cordial support of the western 
counties, the resolutions were approved. The next day 
the House, in regular session, adopted five of them, though 
only by a majority of one vote. One day later (the last 

188 



TEN YEARS OF AGITATION, 1765-1774 189 

day of the session), Henry having started home, the fifth 
resokition — the most important of the five — was expunged 
from the record. But meantime the ivhole seven had been 
pubHshed to the world ; and these resolutions ''rang the alarm 
hell for the continent.'' 

The sixth and seventh resohitions (never really adopted) 
asserted that the colonists were ''not hound to yield obedience'' 
to any law that so imposed taxation upon them from without, 
and denounced any one who should defend such taxation as an 
"enemy of his majesty's colony." These were the clauses that. 
sanctioned forcible resistance. 

The fifth resolution declared that every attempt to vest power 
to tax the colonists in "any persons whatsoever" except the colonial 
Assemblies "has a manifest tendency to destroy British as well as 
American freedom." It was in the debate upon this resolution that 
Henry startled the House by his famous warning from history. 
"Tarquin and Caesar," cried his thrilling voice, "had each his 
Brutus ; Charles the First, his Cromwell ; and George the Third" 
— here he was interrupted by cries of Treason ! Treason ! from 
the Speaker and royalist members; but "rising to a loftier atti- 
tude," with flashing eye, the orator continued, — "may profit 
by their example. If this be treason, make the most of it." 

On the day that Henry moved his resolutions, the Massa- 
chusetts Assembly invited the legislatures of the other 
colonies to send "committees" to a general meet- 
ing at New York in October. At first the sug- Act 
gestion was ignored ; but in August and September ^,°"|^^^^ 
(as public feeling mounted under the stimulus of 
the Virginia resolutions), colony after colony named dele- 
gates, and the Stamp Act Congress duly assembled. Fer- 
vently protesting loyalty to the crown, that meeting drew 
up a noble Declaration of Rights and a group of admirable 
addresses to king and parliament. It did not directly sug- 
gest forcible opposition ; but it helped, mightily, to crystal- 
lize public opinion, and to give dignity to the agitation 
against the law. Better still, it prophesied united action. 
Christopher Gadsden, delegate from South Carolina, ex- 
claimed — "There ought to be no New England man, no 



190 SEPARATION FROM ENGLAND 

New Yorker, known on this continent; but all of us, 
Americans." 

Meanwhile, payment of debts to British creditors was 
generally suspended,^ and local "associations" pledged 

themselves to import no British goods until the 
Resistance ^^^ should be repealed. Sometimes these early 
to the law, Nou-Importatiou Agreements directly threatened 
boycott violence. At a Westmoreland County meeting 

at Leedstown (Virginia) on February 27, 1766, 
the following resolutions were unanimously adopted : 

. . . We, who subscribe this paper, have associated, and do 
bind ourselves to each other, to God, and to our country, by the 
firmest ties that religion and virtue can frame, most sacredly and 
punctually to stand by, and with our lives and fortunes, to support, 
maintain, and defend each other in the observance and execution 
of these following articles. . . . 



Thirdly. As the Stamp Act does absolutely direct the property 
of the people to be taken from them without their consent ex- 
pressed by their representatives, and as in many cases it deprives 
the British American subject of his right to trial by jury ; we do 
determine, at every hazard, and, paying no regard to danger or 
to death, we will exert every faculty, to prevent the execution of 
the said Stamp Act in any instance ivhatsoever within this Colony. 
And every abandoned wretch, who shall be so lost to virtue and 
public good, as wickedly to contribute to the introduction or 
fixture of the Stamp Act in this Colony, by using stampt paper, or 
by any other means, we will, with the utmost expedition, convince 
all such profligates that immediate danger shall attend their prostitute 
purpose. 

Sixthly. If any attempt shall be made on the liberty or prop- 
erty of any associator for any action or thing to be done in conse- 
quence of this engagement, we do most solemnly bind ourselves 

^ This method of coercing English public opinion was renewed in the later 
period of this struggle. In 1774 George Washington wrote to a friend in England : 
"As to withholding our remittances [payments of debts], that is a point on which 
I own I have my doubts on several accounts, but principally on that of justice." 



TEN YEARS OF AGITATION, 1765-1774 191 

by the sacred engagements above entered into, at the utmost risk 
of our lives and fortunes, to restore such associate to his hberty, 
and to protect him in the enjoyment of his property. 

This bold and "seditious" language was drawn up by 
Richard Henry Lee, and among the 115 signers were six 
Lees and a Washington. But more commonly " sons of 
the violent resistance was taken care of by secret liberty " 
societies known as Sons of Liberty, which terrorized the 
stamp distributors and compelled hesitating merchants to 
obey the non-importation agreements. In various places, 
supporters of the law were brutally handled. A Boston 
mob sacked the house 
of Thomas Hutchinson ; 
and Andrew Oliver, 
stamp distributor for 
Massachusetts, standing 
under the "Liberty 
Tree" (on which he had 
been hanged in eflSgy 
shortly before), was 
forced, in the presence 
of two thousand people, 
to swear to a solemn 

"recantation and de- a Handbill Circulated by the New York 

Sons of Liberty. 

testation" of his office 

before a justice of the peace. When the day came for the 
law to go into effect every stamp distributor on the continent 
had been "persuaded" into resigning, and no stamps were 
to be had. After a short period of hesitation, the courts 
opened as usual in most of the colonies, newspapers resumed 
publication, and all forms of business ignored the law. 

In England the ministry had changed, and the new gov- 
ernment was amazed at the uproar in the colonies. It 
was deluged, too, with petitions for repeal from Rgpeai of 
English merchants, who already felt the loss of the stamp 
American trade ; and, after one of the greatest of ^*^* 
parliamentary debates, the Stamp Act was repealed (March 
17, 1766). No serious attempt had been made to enforce 



ddsMidli or makti ujt- of //om-U ^ 
olihtr Ki^y4u4v^ Ici^kt- Ccvu: a4^- i 



192 



SEPARATION FROM ENGLAND 



it, and no demand was made for the punishment of the 
rioters. The English government did ask the colonial as- 
semblies to compensate citizens who had suffered in the riots ; 
but even this request was attended to very imperfectly. 

Within a few months the English ministry was changed 
once more. Pitt (now in the Lords) was the head of the 
new government : and, excepting for Charles Townshend, 




PENNSYLVANIA JOURNAL;! 



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WEEKLY ADVERTISER. 



EXFIRINii-. In Hop** of a Rcfuncetion to Life again. 



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WILLIAM HlADrOHO 



A Reduced Facsimile, from Scharf and Wescott's History of Philadelphia. The 
skull and crossbones take the place of the stamp required by law. This paper 
resumed publication in one week without stamps. 



all its members were "friends of America." But ill-health 
soon forced Pitt .to give up the active management of 
affairs, and the brilliant but unscrupulous Townshend, 
backed by the King, seized the leadership and turned 
promptly to schemes of American taxation. 

In May, 1767, Townshend secured the enactment of 
tariffs on glass, red and white lead, paper, painters' colors, 
The Town- ^^^ ^^^ imported into the colonies. In the 
shend.Acts, Stamp Act discussions, some Americans had ob- 
jected to the stamp duties as an internal tax. 
Now Townshend cynically professed his readiness to give 



TEN YEARS OF AGITATION, 1765-1774 193 

them the external taxation they preferred. This tone was 
bad enough to a sensitive people flushed with recent vic- 
tory ; and two other features made the bill unendurable : 
(1) Trials for attempts to evade the law were to take place 
before admiralty courts without juries ; and (2) the revenue 
was appropriated to the payment of colonial governors and 
judges, so as to give the crown complete control over such 
officers. Thus this law began a wholly 7iew phase of the strug- 
gle with England. In the Stamp Act period the honest pur- 
pose of the English Government had been to protect the colonies, 
not to oppress them. But the Totvnshend law was a wanton 
attempt to demonstrate supremacy, with no pretense of protect- 
ing America. "From this time," says Lecky, "the con- 
duct of the government toward America is little more than 
a series of deplorable blunders." 

Townshend died that same summer ; but, for three years, 
his successor. Lord North, maintained his policy. Mean- 
time the American continent seethed once more And Lord 
with pamphlets, addresses, and non-importation ^°^^^ 
agreements. Assemblies denounced the law ; royal gov- 
ernors, under strict instructions, ordered them to rescind, 
received defiant answers, and replied with messages of 
dissolution. Then, in the absence of means for legal action, 
the colonists turned again to illegal violence. Mobs openly 
landed goods that had paid no tax, and sometimes tarred 
and feathered the customs officials. 

To check such resistance to law, parliament, in 1769, 
added to its offenses by providing that a colonist, accused 
of treason, might be carried to England for trial, _,, „. . . 
— in flat defiance of the ancient English princi- Assembly's 
pie of trial by a jury of the neighborhood. This Resolutions 
threat roused Virginia again. Virginia was still 
the most important colony. It had been less affected by 
the Townshend regulations than the commercial colonies 
had been ; and the ministry had been particularly gentle 
toward it, hoping to draw it away from the rest of America. 
But now the Assembly unanimously adopted resolutions 
denouncing both the Townshend law and this recent attack 



194 



SEPARATION FROM ENGLAND 




0) o 



TEN YEARS OF AGITATION, 1765-1774 195 

on jury trial as unconstitutional and tyrannical. Nicholas, 
one of the Virginia leaders, declared that the new law was 
" fraught with worse evils than the Stamp Act, by as much 
as life is more precious than property" ; and George Wash- 
ington affirmed that it touched a matter "on which no one 
ought to hesitate to take up arms." 

The governor punished the House by peremptory disso- 
lution.^ But other Assemblies copied the Virginia resolu- 
tions or adopted similar ones ; and non-importation agree- 
ments, enforced by semi-revolutionary committees, became 
nearly universal. 

During this turmoil, came the Boston "Massacre." Two 
regiments of British regulars had been sent to Boston, in 
the fall of 1768, to overawe that turbulent com- ^ „ 

rT\, . • PIT .1 The Boston 

munity. Ihis quartermg ot soldiery upon the "Massa- 
town in time of peace, not for protection, but for "®''' 
intimidation, was one more infringement of fun- 
damental English liberties. Incessant bickerings followed. 
Town officials quarreled with the royal governor ; and the 
townspeople and the soldiers squabbled and indulged in 
fisticuffs in the streets. The troops were subjected to con- 
stant and bitter insult ; and on the evening of March 5, 
1770, came the long-delayed collision. Soldiers and people 
had been called into the streets by an alarm of fire. Va- 
rious fracases occurred. In particular, a sentinel on duty 

1 Whereon, continues the Journals of the House, "the late representatives of 
the people, judging it necessary that some Measures should be taken in their dis- 
tressed Situation . . . resolved upon a Meeting for that very salutary purpose, 
and therefore, immediately, with the greatest Order and Decorum, repaired to the 
house of Mr. Anthony Hay." Then the late Speaker was chosen "Moderator," 
and, after due consideration, the gathering unanimously "recommended" to the 
colony a long and detailed non-importation association, drawn by George Mason, 
supported by George Washington, and signed at once by the 89 ex-Burgesses 
present. The Journal entry closes with the following delicious passage : — 

"The business being finished, the following TOASTS were drank: — 

The KING, 

The QUEEN and ROYAL FAMILY. 

His Excellency Lord BOTETOURT [Governor], and Prosperity to VIRGINIA. 

The speedy and lasting Union between Great Britain and her Colonies. 

The constitutional British Liberty in America, and all true Patriots, Supporters 
thereof." 



196 SEPARATION FROM ENGLAND 

was pelted with epithets and snowballs. Six or seven of 
his companions, under an officer, came to his rescue. One 
of them, hit by a club, shot an assailant, and immediately 
the rest of the squad, believing an order to fire had been 
given, discharged a volley into the crowd. Five persons 
were killed and six injured. 

The next day, on the demand of a crowded town meeting, 
and as the only way to prevent an organized attack by the 
citizens upon the troops, Governor Hutchinson removed 
the regiments to a fort in the harbor. The troops had be- 
haved well for many months, under intense provocation, 
and are not seriously to be blamed. The mob, no doubt, 
deserved blame. But the chief condemnation falls upon 
the British ministry, which had deliberately created the 
situation that made this "Massacre" inevitable. Some 
months later, the soldiers were tried before a Boston jury. 
John Adams and Josiah Quincy, leading patriots, volun- 
teered as their counsel, risking gallantly their popularity 
and influence. Two of the soldiers were punished lightly ; 
the rest were acquitted. 

The Townshend Acts were a failure. They had driven 
the colonies to the verge of rebellion. Each penny collected 
under them had cost the English treasury a 
of the shilling, and English merchants were suffering 

Townshend keenly from the colonial non-importation policy. 
On the day of the Boston Massacre, Lord North 
moved the repeal, except for the insignificant tax on tea, 
giving notice also that the government would lay no 
more taxes in America. The tea tax was kept, at the 
King's insistence, — to mark the principle of parliamentary 
supremacy. 

But instead of seeking real reconciliation, the British 
ministry took just this time to hector the various colonial 
Continued Assemblies by arbitrary "orders" on many differ- 
fnction ^^i subjects. When the Assemblies protested, 

the governors, under strict instructions, dissolved them ; 
and at other times the usual liberties of the Assemblies, 



TEN YEARS OF AGITATION. 1765-1774 197 

such as the choice of Speaker and place of meeting, were 
needlessly infringed. 

During these disorders, America learned to organize itself 
in a semi-revolutionary manner. Committees of corre- 
spondence here and there had been a familiar f ea- ^j^^ ^^_ 
ture of the agitation ; but now standing commit- ginning of 
tees took the place of the old legal Assemblies ary°o"griSr 
and town meetings. On the motion of Samuel zationinthe 
Adams, in November, 1772, a Boston town meet- sam°Adams 
ing appointed a committee of twenty-one to main- and the 
tain correspondence with the other toimis of the chusett's 
province upon the infringements of their liberties, com- 
Some such device was made necessary by the fact ™* 
that the Massachusetts Assembly was no longer free. The 
two hundred towns responded promptly by appointing simi- 
lar committees, and soon a vigorous correspondence was 
going on throughout this complicated network. 

Samuel Adams, "the man of the Town-Meeting," was the 
first American political "boss," in the better sense of the 
word. He played with unfailing skill upon the many 
strings of the town meeting, working his will through com- 
mittees and faithful lieutenants. He has been called "the 
wedge that split England and America asunder." Dr. 
Howard says of him {Preliminaries of the Revolution) : — 

"He possessed precisely the qualities which belong to a con- 
summate revolutionary leader. The very narrowness of view 
which often prevented him from seeing the merits of his adver- 
saries only added to this power. He had unbounded faith in 
democratic self-government . . . and was almost fanatical in his 
zeal for constitutional liberty. He had indomitable will, great 
tenacity of purpose, and unflinching courage. . . , He was poor 
in worldly goods, simple in manner and dress, and able to enter 
sympathetically into the thoughts and feelings of plain men. 
Much of his power lay in his ability to persuade and lead the 
fishermen, rope-makers, and ship-masters of Boston. . . . [He] 
had a rare talent for practical politics. He displayed a capacity 
for organization, sometimes lapsing into intrigue, and a foresight 
sometimes sinking into cunning." 



198 SEPARATION FROM ENGLAND 

After all, each colony was fairly certain, sooner or later, 
to find a way to express itself through some revolutionary 
organization. It was not so certain that the thir- 
and^t^e ^^^^ colonies coulcl he united by revolutionary 
germ of machinery. Here the first step was taken by 
union^ Virginia. The occasion arose out of the burning 

of the Gaspee, a revenue schooner off the Rhode 
Island coast — whose commander had become extremely 
obnoxious to the colony. In pursuit of a smuggler's 
boat, the Gaspee ran aground. It was then boarded by 
an armed mob, led by a prominent merchant. The com- 
mander was shot, the crew put on shore, and the vessel 
burned. The English government created a special com- 
mission to secure the offenders for trial in England. But, 
though the actors were well known to large numbers of 
people, no evidence against them could be secured ; and, 
indeed, Stephen Hopkins, Chief Justice of the colony, 
declared he would commit to prison any ofiicer who should 
attempt to remove a citizen from the limits of the com- 
monwealth. 

Meantime, as in 1769, the attempt to send Americans to 
England for trial called forth ringing resolutions from the 
Virginia Assembly (March 12, 1773). But this time the 
Assembly did more than pass resolutions. It appointed a 
standing committee for intercoloyiial correspondence, and by 
formal letter invited all other Assemblies in America to ap- 
point similar means of intercourse. Within three months, 
committees had been set up in half the colonies, and ere 
long the machinery was complete. July 2, the Netv Hamp- 
shire Gazette said of this movement : " The Union of the 
Colonies which is now taking place is big with the most 
important Advantages to this Continent. . . . Let it be 
the study of all to make the Union firm and perpetual, as it 
will be the great Basis for Liberty and every public Bless- 
ing in America." 

The next step toward revolutionary government was to 
develop from the local committees a Provincial Congress, 



TEN YEARS OF AGITATION, 1765-1774 199 

in colony after colony, and from the intercolonial committees 
of the continent a Continental Congress. This came about 
in the summer and fall of 1774, as the result of Local com- 
three events, — the attempt of the ministry to mittees 
force taxed tea down the throats of the colo- -"^p^ov^nciai 
nists, the answer of the Boston Tea Party, and Con- 
the punishment of Boston by the Port Bill, g^^^ses" 

Ever since the repeal of the other Townshend duties the 
animosities of the conflict had been focused on the one 
taxed article, tea. Says Moses Coit Tvler at the _, 

. ' . The tea tax 

close of a delightful summary {Literary History of 
the American Revolution, I, 246-253) : 

"The latent comedy of the situation flashes upon us now from 
the grostesque prominence then given, in the politics of the British 
empire, to this coy and peace-loving tea plant. By a sort of 
sarcasm of fate, it happened that between the years 1770 and 1775, 
this ministress of gentleness and peace, — this homelike, dainty, 
and consolatory herb of Cathay, — came to be regarded, both in 
America and England, as the one active and malignant cause of 
nearly all the ugly and disastrous business. . . . The innocent 
shrub . . . seldom receives in our literature for those years any 
less lurid description than . . . 'pestilential herb.' Just south 
of the Potomac, a much-excited young woman, addicted, as she 
supposed, to poetry as well as to politics, sent forth to the world 
a number of stanzas entitled 'Virginia Banishing Tea,' wherein 
that valorous colony exclaims, — 

'Begone, pernicious, baleful Tea, 
With all Pandora's ills possessed ; 
Hyson, no more beguiled by thee 
My noble sons shall be oppressed.' 

Tory punsters, on the other hand, were inclined to liken the whole 
disturbance to 'a tempest in a teapot.'" 

For six years the colonists, for the most part, had done 
without that luxury — except for the smuggled article. 
In April of 1773 Lord North tried an appeal to ^^^j l^j-^j 
American avarice. Tea paid a tax of a shilling Norths 
a pound on reaching England, and, under the 
Townshend Act, threepence more on importation into 



200 SEPARATION FROM ENGLAND 

America. Parliament now arranged that a rebate of the 
English tax (and of some other burdens) should be given the 
Tea Company on tea reexported to America, — so that the 
colonists would pay the threepence tax, and would still get 
their tea cheaper than Englishmen could, — and cheaper 
than it could be smuggled. Ships loaded with this gross 
bait were at once dispatched to the chief American ports. 
But everywhere, by forcible resistance, the colonists kept 
the tea out of the market. At Charleston it was stored for 
Resistance y^ars, until scized by the Revolutionary govern- 
to the land- ment in 1776. At New York, Annapolis, and 
ing o tea Philadelphia, mobs frightened the governors or 
the ship captains into sending back the tea ships without 
breaking cargo. A tea ship was expected at Philadelphia 
in September. The "Liberty Boys" of that city distribu- 
ted a handbill Jimong the Delaware pilots : — 

"... We need not point out the steps you ought to take if the 
tea ship falls in your way. . . . This you may depend upon, — 
that whatever pilot brings her into the river, such pilot will be 
marked for his treason. . . . Like Cain, he will be hung out as a 
spectacle to the nations ... as the damned traitorous pilot who 
brought up the tea ship. . . . 
(Signed) The Committee for Tarring and Feathering." 

Another broadside was addressed to the captain of the ex- 
pected ship : — " What think you, Captain, of a Halter 
round your Neck, ten gallons of liquid Tar decanted on 
your Pate, with the feathers of a dozen wild Geese laid 
over that, to enliven your appearance." All this was 
weeks before the Boston episode. The Philadelphia ship, 
however, did not arrive at the mouth of the river until 
four or five days after the Boston Tea Party ; and it then 
sailed back to England without trying to reach the city. 

In Boston the "Tories" were made of sterner stuff, and 
the clash was more serious. Governor Hutchinson had 
stationed warships in the channel to prevent the timid 
owner of three tea vessels from sending them away; and 
the customs officials prepared to land the tea by a force 



TEN YEARS OF AGITATION, 1765-1774 201 

of marines as soon as the legal interval should expire. 
(Ships were allowed to remain only twenty days in the 
harbor without unloading.) Boston exhausted The Boston 
all means but actual violence, — and then used "^®^,, 

Party, 

that so skillfully as to avoid bloodshed. At the December 
last moment, a town meeting resolved itself ^^' ^'^'^^ 
into a band of Mohawks ("with whom," says Carlyle, 
"Sam Adams could speak without an interpreter"), and, 
seizing the vessels before they passed into the hands of the 
officials, emptied into Boston harbor some ninety thousand 
dollars' worth of tea (December 16, 1773). 

The short-sighted English government replied with a 
series of "repressive acts" ^ to punish Massachusetts. Town 
meetings were forbidden, except as authorized in writing by 
the governor, and for business specified by him. All courts, 
high and low, with all their officials, were made absolutely 
dependent upon his appointing and removing power. So 
far as the election of the Council was concerned, the charter 
of 1691 was set aside, and the appointment given to the 
crown. Most effective in rousing American indignation 
was another act of this series, the Boston Port ^^^ ^^^ 
Bill, which closed the port of Boston to com- Boston Port 
merce, with provision for a blockade by ships of 
war. Since the entire population depended, directly or 
indirectly, upon commerce for their living, the town was 
threatened with starvation. Food and fuel at once became 
scarce and costly, and great numbers of men were unem- 
ployed. But all parts of America joined in sending money 
and supplies. South Carolina gave cargoes of rice ; Phila- 
' delphia gave a thousand barrels of flour ; from Connecticut 
came Israel Putnam driving before him his flock of sheep. 

^ Classed with tliese acts, in the minds of the colonists, was the Quebec Act 
which was; passed at the same time. This legalized the Catholic religion, and 
restored part of the French law, for Canada. The design was to conciliate the 
French settlers (almost the sole population), and to set up some authority to deal 
with the existing anarchy in the fur-trade regions. No act of the series, however, 
caused more bitter suspicion among the English colonies, with their bigoted fear 
of Catholicism. The same act extended "Quebec" to include the unsettled dis- 
trict west of the mountains bchcecn the Great Lakes and the Ohio. 



202 SEPARATION FROM ENGLAND 

May 12, two days after the arrival of the news of the 
"Intolerable Acts," the committees of eight near-by towns 
met at Boston. This gathering sent letters to the corre- 
spondence committees of the thirteen colonies suggesting 
that all America should "consider Boston as suffering in 
the common cause, and resent the injury inflicted upon her." 

. . The first official response came from Virginia, 

calls a May 24, 1774, the House of Burgesses set apart 

continental j^^e 1 (when the Port Bill was to go into effect) 
"as a Day of Fasting, Humiliation, and Prayer, 
devoutly to implore the divine interposition for averting 
the heavy Calamity which threatens Destruction to our 
Civil Rights, and the Evils of civil War, and to give us one 
heart and one Mind firmly to oppose by all just and proper 
means every injury to American Rights." Two days later 
the governor dissolved the Assembly with sharp rebuke. 

On the following day, as on the like occasion five years be- 
fore (page 194), the ex-Burgesses met at the Raleigh Tavern, 
and recommended an annual congress of delegates from all the 
colonies "to deliberate on those general measures which the 
united interests of America may from time to time require." 
Here was a suggestion for permanent continental revolutionary 
government. A second meeting of the ex-Burgesses, on May 
31, called a Convention of deputies from Virginia 
Virginia couutics, to meet at Williamsburg on August 1, 
". ^°°^®°- in order to appoint Virginia delegates for the pro- 
posed continental congress and to consider a plan 
for non-intercourse with England. During June and July 
the Virginia counties, from the Blue Ridge to the Sea, 
ratified this call in county courts, by authorizing their ex- 
Burgesses to act for them at the proposed Convention, or 
by choosing new representatives to do so. Here were the 
germs of revolutionary 7nachinery for county and state. 

The records of thirty-one of these Virginia county meet- 
The county ^^§^ have been preserved. In all of them resolu- 
meetingsin tions Were adopted, in the nature of instruc- 
Virgima tions to the county's delegates to the coming 
Virginia Convention. Many of these documents are great 



BEGINNINGS OF REVOLUTIONARY GOVERNMENTS 203 

state papers, equal in logic and rhetoric to those put forth 
three months later by the Continental Congress at Phila- 
delphia. Typical in sentiment and language are the Fair- 
fax County resolutions of July 18 (George Washington 
presiding) — of which perhaps a twentieth part follows : — 

" Resolved . . . that our ancestors . . . brought with them, 
even if the same had not beeu confirmed by Charters, the civil 
Constitution and form of Government of the country they came 
from, and were by the laws of nature and Nations entitled to all 
its privileges, immunities, and advantages, which have descended 
to us, their posterity . . . 

" Resolved, That the most important and valuable part of the 
British Constitution, upon which its very existence depends, is 
the fundamental principle of the people's being governed by no 
laws to which they have not given their consent by Representatives 
freely chosen by themselves, who are affected by the laws they enact 
equally un.th their constituents, to whom they are accountable and 
whose burthens they share . . . 

" Resolved, That the claim lately assumed by the British 
Parliament, for making all such laws as they think fit to govern the 
people of these Colonies, and to extort from us our money with- 
out our consent, ... is totally incompatible with the privileges 
of a free people and the natural rights of mankind . . . 

" Resolved, That taxation and representation are in their nature 
inseparable ; that the right of withholding, or of giving and grant- 
ing their own money, is the only effectual security to a free people 
against the encroachments of despotism and tyranny . . . 

" Resolved, That the powers over the people of America, now 
claimed by the British House of Commons, — in whose election 
we have no share; in whose determinations we have no influence; 
whose information must be always defective, and often false; who 
in many instances may have a separate, and in some an opposite 
interest to ours; and who are removed from those impressions of 
tenderness and compassion, arising from personal intercourse and 
connection, ivhich soften the rigours of the most despotick Govern- 
ment, must, if continued, establish the most grievous and intoler- 
able species of tyranny and oppression that ever was inflicted 
upon mankind." 

The document goes on to declare that "all manner of 
luxury and extravagance ought immediately to be laid 



204 SEPARATION FROM ENGLAND 

aside" (horse racing is especially denounced in several coun- 
ties as a form of "dissipation inconsistent with the gloomy 
prospect before us"); that men of fortune "ought to set 
examples of temperance and frugality" ; that, to encourage 
the wool industry (for supplies of domestic clothing) "those 
who have large stocks of sheep [should] sell to their neighbors 
at a moderate price" ; and that "merchants and vendors of 
goods ought not to take advantage of our present distress 
but continue to sell the merchandize they now have ... at 
the same prices they have been accustomed to," with sinister 
suggestion as to what might happen to said vendors if this 
advice were neglected. Many counties with studied econ- 
omy of phrase except from the non-importation agreement 
saltpeter and sulphur, as "articles of increasing necessity." 

On the suggestion from Virginia, all the colonies but 
Georgia chose delegates to a congress, to meet September 
1 at Philadelphia. We know this "First Conti- 
Continentai '''^'''^«^ Congress" of 177^ only from letters and 
Congress, later recollections of some of its members and 
I??/'" ^^ from imperfect notes taken at the time by two 
or three delegates. It sat six weeks, and was a 
notable gathering, — although forty years afterwards John 
Adams described it as "one third Tories, one third Whigs 
and the rest Mongrels," 

The Moderate party (Adams' "Tories") desired still to 
use only constitutional agitation to secure redress of griev- 
ances. This element was led by Joseph Galloway of Penn- 
sylvania, supported by John Jay of New York and Edward 
Rutledge of South Carolina. The Radicals insisted that, 
as a prelude to reconciliation with England, the ministry 
must remove its troops and repeal its acts. After strenu- 
ous debate, Galloway's proposals were rejected by a vote 
of six colonies to Jive. The Congress then recommended 
the Radical plan of a huge universal boycott, in the form 
of a solemn Association. The signers were to bind them- 
selves neither to import any British goods nor to export 
their own products to Great Britain. To enforce this agree- 



THE FIRST CONTINENTAL CONGRESS, 1771 205 

ment, efficient machinery was recommended. Every town 
and county was advised to choose a committee, acting 
under the supervision of the central committee of its prov- 
ince, "to observe the conduct of all persons," and to have 
all violations "published in the gazette," that the foes to 
the rights of America might be "universally contemned." 
Both content and language of the great Act are modeled 
closely upon the Virginia Convention's resolutions — which, 
in turn, followed closely the Fairfax County resolutions 
quoted above. 

The ''First Continental Congress" was not a legislature or a 
government. The name "congress" was used to indicate 
its informal character. No governing body had Not a " gov- 
ever held that name. It was a meeting for con- ernment " 
sultation. It claimed no authority to do more than advise 
and recommend. The delegates had hee7i elected in exceed- 
ingly informal fashion, — by a part of a legislature, called 
together perhaps in an irregular way ; or by a committee 
of correspondence ; or by a mass meeting of some small part 
of a colony, claiming to speak for the whole ; or, in six colo- 
nies, by a new sort of gatherings known as ^provincial con- 
ventions, similar to that in Virginia (above). None of this 
first series of provincial conventions sat more than five or 
six days (most of them only for -a day) : and none took 
any action except to appoint delegates to Philadelphia and 
to instruct them, — except that one or two provided for 
a second convention, to be held after the Continental 
Congress. 



CHAPTER XI 

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 

I. FROM COLONIES TO COMMONWEALTHS, 1775-1776 

The Assemblies of New York and Georgia refused to 
ratify the recommendations of the Continental Congress. 
But within six months all other colonies had adopted the 
Association — either by their regular Assemblies or by 
"conventions"; and everywhere "committees of public 
safety" and mobs were terrorizing reluctant individuals 
into signing. Tar and feathers and "the birch seal" be- 
came common means of persuasion ; and Moderates com- 
plained bitterly that, in the name of liberty, the populace 
denied all liberty of speech or action. A great revolution, 
however righteous, is sure to have its ugly phases. 

The issue had changed. The question, now, was not 
approval or disapproval of parliamentary taxation, but 
whether resistance should be forcible. The radical "Pa- 
triots" were probably a minority; but they were aggres- 
sive and organized, and eventually they whipped into line 
the great body of timid and indifferent people. On the 
other hand, many earnest "Patriots" of the preceding 
period now became "Tories" from repugnance to armed 
rebellion or to mob rule. Even John Adams was seriously 
disturbed by the glee of a horse-jockey client at the clos- 
ing of the courts. In the few cities the revolutionary move- 
ment fell largely to the democratic artisan class. June 
1, 1774, the governor of New York, writing to the English 
government on the excitement about the Boston Port Bill, 
says : — 

"The Men who call'd themselves the Committee [in New York] 
— who acted and dictated in the name of the People — were 

206 



FROM COLONIES TO COMMONWEALTHS 



207 



many of them of the lower Rank, and all the warmest zealots. . . . 
The more considerable Merchants and Citizens seldom or never 
appeared among them, but, I believe, were not displeased with 
the Clamor and opposition that was shown against internal 
Taxation by Parliament." 

In the winter and 
spring of 1775, regular 
legal government broke 
down. In colony after 
colony, the governors 
refused to let the legis- 
lature meet, and the 
people refused to let 
the governors' courts or 
other officials act. Then 
in many places, to pre- 
vent absolute lawless- 
ness, county meetings 
or local committees set 
up some sort of 'pro- 
visional government, to 
last until "the restora- 
tion of harmony with 
Great Britain." Action 
of this kind in Meck- 
lenburg County, North 
Carolina, on May SO, 1775, through distorted recollections, 
gave rise years later to the legend of a Mecklenburg 
"Declaration of Independence" on May 20. 

' A statue by Daniel Chester French at Concord Bridge. On one face of the 
base is inscribed a stanza from Emerson's "Concord Hymn" : — 




The Concord Minute Man-^ 



Here once the embattled farmers stood 
And fired the shot heard round the world. 

Across the stream, in a curve of the stone fence, is the grave of two British 
soldiers, over whose dust have been carved the lines from Lowell : — 

They came three thousand miles and died. 
To keep the Past upon its throne. 



208 



THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 



During this turbulent disorder, second provincial conven- 
tions were held in several colonies, to act upon the recom- 
mendations of the First Continental Congress. 
Of course the *' Tories" had refused to pay any 



become 
de facto 
govern- 
ments 



A second 
group of 

conventions attention to the "illegal" elections, and in some 
cases, indeed, they were excluded from voting by 
test oaths. Soine of these conventions now became 
de facto governments. They organized troops, 
raised money, and assumed civil powers far enough to 

alleviate the existing 
anarchy. In form, their 
acts were still recom- 
mendations; but the lo- 
cal committees enforced 
them as law. 

These second conven- 
tions in most of the 
colonies appointed dele- 
gates to the Second 
Continental Congress. 
Between the election of 
that body and its meet- 
ing (May 10), General 
Gage, commander of the 
British troops in Boston, 
tried to seize Massa- 
chusetts military stores at Concord, — - and so called from 
Lexington "embattled farmers" "the shot heard round the 
and Concord world"' {April 19, 1775) . Gage had sown dragon's 
teeth. From New England's soil twenty thousand volun- 
teers sprang up to besiege him in Boston. 

In consequence, the Second Continental Congress swiftly 
became a government, to manage the continental 
revolution ; and, during the summer, a third lot 
of provincial conventions openly avowed them- 
selves governments for their respective colonies, 
— appointing committees of safety (in place of 
the royal governors, who had been set aside or driveq 




The Concord Fight — the painting by Sim- 
mons in the Boston State House. Cf • p. 165. 



Second 

Continental 

Congress 

becomes a 

continental 

government 



FROM COLONIES TO COMMONWEALTHS 



209 



out), and themselves assuming even the forms of legislative 
bodies. 

The members of the Second Continental Congress, like 
those of the First, had been elected, not as a legislature, 
but to formulate opiriion, and to report their recommendations 
back to their colonies for approval. The war changed all 
that. A central govern- 
ment urns imperative; 
and the patriot party 
everywhere recognized 
the Congress as the 
only agent to fill that 
place. 

For the first five 
weeks, that body con- 
tinued to pass recom- 
mendations only. But 
June 15 it adopted the 
irregular forces about 
Boston as a continental 
army, and appointed 
George Washington 
commander in chief. A 
year later it proclaimed 
the Declaration of In- 
dependence. Between The Washington Elm at Cambridge. From 




a photograph taken in 1895. 
tion runs : — 

Under this tree 

Washington 

first took command 

of the 

American army 

July 3, 1775. 



The inscrip- 



these two events it cre- 
ated a navy, opened 
negotiations with foreign 
states, issued bills of 
credit on the faith of 
the colonies, and took 
over (from the old English control) the management of 
Indian affairs and of the crude post office. 

Thirteen 

But the Revolution in government was not ''."^?f"" 
one movement. It was a whirl of thirteen State 
revolutions within this Continental revolution. The de 



210 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 

velopment of the State government of Virginia is fairly 
typical. 

County gatherings in that Province in December and 
January (1774-1775) approved the Continental Congress 
. . and set up the Association, so that a second con- 

passes from vention was not necessary until it came time to 

colony to appoint delegates to the Second Continental Con- 
common- H T • • 1 • 

wealth: gress. Meantime, many counties, on their own 
a typical initiative, organized and armed a revolutionary mi- 
litia, raising the necessary "taxes" by "recom- 
mendations" of county committees; and Cumberland 
County formally instructed its delegates to the Second 
Provincial Convention to declare to that body that any 
general tax imposed by it for such purposes would be 
"cheerfully submitted to by the inhabitants of this county." 
The First Convention (August, 1774) had authorized its 
chairman to call a second when desirable. The Second Con- 
vention met March 20, 1775. It passed only "recommen- 
dations" in form; but it did organize the revolutionary 
militia into a state system. It sat only eight days ; but it 
recommended the counties at once to choose delegates to a 
Third Convention to represent the colony for one year. 

Governor Dunmore forbade the elections to this Third 
Convention as "acts of sedition"; but they passed off with 
regularity. Meantime, the governor called an Assembly, 
to consider a proposal from Lord North, intended to draw 
Virginia away from the common cause. Instead of this, 
the Assembly gave formal sanction to all the acts of the 
Continental congresses and of the Virginia conventions. 
In the squabbles that followed, Dunmore took refuge on 
board a British man-of-war. The Assembly strenuously 
"deplored" that their governor should so "desert" the 
The end of "loy^^l and suffering colony," and adjourned, June 
royal gov- 24. This ended the last vestige of royal govern- 
ernment nient ill Virginia. Three weeks later, the Third 
Convention gathered at Richmond (out of range of guns 
from warships), and promptly assumed all powers and 
forms of government. It gave all bills three readings, and 



FROM COLONIES TO COMMONWEALTHS 211 

enacted them as ordinances; and it elected an executive (a 
"committee of safety"), and appointed a colonial Treasurer 
and other needful officials. In the winter of 1776 it dis- 
solved, that a new body, fresher from the people, might 
act on the pressing questions of independence and of a 
permanent government. 

The Loyalists early began to accuse the Patriots of aiming 
at independence. But, until some months after Lexington, 
the Patriots vehemently disavowed such "vil- ^ , , 

, . ,, . 1 • • 1 1 -rr- Growth of 

lamy, protestmg enthusiastic loyalty to King the idea of 
George. They were ready to fight, — but only as mdepend- 
Englishmen had often fought, to compel a change 
in "ministerial policy." Otis, Dickinson, Hamilton, in 
their printed pamphlets, all denounced any thought of in- 
dependence as a crime. Continental congresses and pro- 
vincial conventions solemnly repeated such disclaimers. In 
March, 1775, Franklin declared that he had never heard a 
word in favor of independence "from any person drunk or 
sober." Two months later still, after Lexington, Washing- 
ton soothed a Loyalist friend with the assurance that if 
the friend ever heard of his [Washington's] joining in any 
such measure, he had leave to set him down for everything 
wicked : and June 26, after becoming commander of the 
American armies, Washington assured the New Yorkers 
that he would exert himself to establish "peace and har- 
mony between the mother country and the colonies." In 
September, 1775, Jefferson was still "looking with fondness 
towards a reconciliation," and John Jay asserts that not 
until after that month did he ever hear a desire for inde- 
pendence from "an American of any description." For 
months after Bunker Hill, American chaplains, in public 
services before the troops, prayed for King George ; and, for 
long, Washington continued to refer to the British army 
merely as the '''ministerial troops." Even in February, 
1776, when Gadsden in the South Carolina convention ex- 
pressed himself in favor of independence, he roused merely a 
storm of dismay, and found no support. And a month later 



212 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 

still, Maryland instructed lier delegates to the Continental 
Congress not to consent to any proposal for independence. 

All this was honestly meant ; but the years of agitation had 
sapped the ties of loyalty more than men really knew, and 
a few months of war broke them wholly. In the fall of 1775 
the King refused contemptuously even to receive a petition for 
reconciliation from Congress ; and soon afterward, he sent to 
America an army of "Hessians" hired out, for slaughter, by 
petty German princelings. Moreover, it became plain that, 
in order to resist England, the colonies must have foreign 
aid ; and no foreign power could be expected to give us 
open aid while we professed ourselves English colonies. 

Thus, unconsciously, American patriots were ready to 
change front. Then, in January, 1776, came Thomas 
Paine's daring and trenchant argument for inde- 
Paine's pendence in Common Sense. This fifty-page pub- 

Common licatiou, in clarion tone, spoke out what the 
community hailed at once as its own unspoken 
thought. One hundred and twenty thousand copies sold in 
three months, — one for every three families in America. 
At first the author's name was not given, and the booklet 
was commonly attributed to one of the Adamses or to 
Franklin. Paine was a poor English emigrant, of thirteen 
months before, whom Franklin had befriended for the "genius 
in his eyes." A few lines may represent his terse style. 

"The period of debate is closed. Arms . . . must decide. . . . 
By referring the matter from argument to arms, a new era in 
politics is struck. . . . All plans . . . prior to the nineteenth 
of April are like the almanacs of last year. . . . 

"Where, say some, is the king of America ? I'll tell you, friend. 
He reigns above, and doth not make havoc of mankind, like the 
royal brute of Britain. ... A government of our own is our 
natural right. . . . Freedom has been hunted round the globe. 
Asia and Africa have long expelled her. Europe regards her like 
a stranger; and England has given her warning to depart. O, 
receive the fugitive and prepare in time an asylum for mankind." 

Meantime, the growth of independent State governments 
was going on. Several colonies had applied to Congress 



INDEPENDENCE AND STATE GOVERNMENTS 213 

for counsel, in the disorders of the fall of 1775. In reply, 
Congress "recommended" the provincial convention of New 
Hampshire "to call a full and free representation other state 
of the people . . . [to] establish such a form of govem- 
government as in their judgment will best produce ™®"*^ 
the happiness of the people and most effectually secure 
peace and good order in that province, during the continu- 
ance of the present dispute heticeen Great Britain and the colo- 
nies.'^ Under such advice, early in 1776, New Hampshire 
and South Carolina set up provisional constitutions. These 
documents, however, did not imply independence. They 
declared themselves temporary, and referred always to the 
commonwealths not as States, but as "colonies." 

But May 15, 1776, Congress took more advanced action. 
It recommended the "assemblies and conventions" of all 
colonies, "where no government sufficient to the Congress 
exigencies of their affairs hath been hitherto es- recom- 

, ,. , , 1 in mends State 

tablished, to adopt such a government as shall, govern- 
in the opinion of the representatives of the people, ^ei^ts 
best conduce to the happiness and safety of t^eir constitu- 
ents in particular, and of America in general." Two days 
later, in a letter to his wife, John Adams hailed this action 
(for which he had been the foremost champion) as "a total, 
absolute independence . . . for such is the amount of the 
resolve of the 15th." 

Virginia had not waited for this counsel. The Fourth 
Virginia convention (page 211) met May 6, 1776, and 
turned at once to the questions of independence Virginia 
and of a constitution. The only difference of leads for 
opinion was : Should Virginia, standing alone, de- gnce^and'a 
clare herself an independent State and frame a state con- 
constitution for herself? Or should she try to ^*^**^*^'°'^ 
get the Continental Congress to make a declaration and to 
suggest a general model of government for all the new 
States? Plans were presented, representing each of these 
views. On May 15, after much debate, the convention de- 
termined upon a middle plan. Unanimously it instructed 
its representatives in Congress to move immediately for a gen- 



214 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 

eral Declaration of Independence there ; and it appointed com- 
mittees at once to draw up a constitution for Virginia herself 
as an independent State. This was done some days before 
the recommendation of Congress for State constitutions was 
known in Virginia. 

The bill of rights (the first part of the constitution) was 
reported by the committee May 27, and adopted by the 
convention June 12. The ''frame of government was 
adopted June 29. To it at the last moment was prefixed 
a third part of the constitution, a declaration of independence 
for Virginia, earher than the Continental Declaration. 

The Virginia Bill of Rights was the first document of 
the kind in our history, and it remains one of our greatest 
The Virginia state papers. Three or four States at once copied 
Bill of it, and all the bills of rights during the Revolu- 

^^ *^ tionary period show its influence. Some provi- 

sions, such as those against excessive bail, cruel or unusual 
punishments, arbitrary imprisonment, and the like, go back 
to ancient English charters, even for their wording. Recent 
grievances suggested certain other clauses, — the prohibition 
of "general warrants " (page 171), the insistence upon free- 
dom of the i)ress, and the emphasis upon the idea that a 
jury must be "of the vicinage" (page 193). 

More significant still, this immortal document opens with 
a splendid assertion of human rights. English bills of rights 
had insisted upon the historic rights of Englishmen, but had 
said nothing of any rights of man: they had protested 
against specific grievances, but had asserted no general 
principles. Such principles, however, had found frequent 
expression in English literature, and thence had become 
household phrases with American political thinkers.^ Now, 
these fundamental principles, upon which American govern- 
ment rests, were written by George Mason into this Virginia 
bill of rights, — a fact which distinguishes that document 

1 Cf. Otis' words, page 171 above. About 1760 this democratic English liter- 
ature began to affect deeply a few P^rench thinkers, like Rousseau. These men 
stated the old English principles with a new French brilliancy ; and it is sometimes 
hard to say whether the American leaders drew their doctrines from the French 
or the older English sources. 



THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE 215 

from any previous governmental document in the world. 
Two or three weeks later, Jefferson incorporated similar 
principles, clothed in phrase both more eloquent and more 
judicious, in the opening paragraphs of the Continental 
Declaration of Independence. 

Among the principles of the Virginia document are the 
statements : — 

" That all men are by nature equally free ^ and independent, and 
have certain inherent rights. . . . 

" That all j)ower is . . . derived from the people. 

" That government is, or ought to be, instituted for the common 
benefit of the people . . .and that when any government shall 
be found inadequate ... a majority of the community hath an 
indubitable, inalienable, and indefeasible right to reform, alter, 
or abolish it. . . . 

*' That no free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be 
preserved . . . but ... by frequent recurrence to fundamental 
principles. 

" That ... all men are equally entitled to the free exercise 
of religion, according to the dictates of conscience." 

June 7, soon after the Virginia instructions of May 15 
reached Philadelphia, the Virginia delegation in the Con- 
tinental Congress moved that the united colonies be jj^^ ^^5^- 
declared '"free and independent States." Brief de- canDeciara- 
bate followed ; but action was postponed, to per- independ- 
mit uninstructed delegates to consult their As- ence, July 4, 
semblies. Meantime, Congress appointed a com- 
mittee to prepare a fitting "Declaration" for use if the 
motion should prevail. Happily it fell to Thomas Jefferson 
to pen the document ; and his splendid faith in democracy 
gave the Declaration a convincing eloquence which has 
made it ever since a mighty power in directing the destiny 
of the world. 

' According to Edmund Randolph, the phrase equally free was objected to as 
inconsistent with slavery. Such objectors were quieted with the amazing assur- 
ance that " slaves, not being constituent members of our society, could never pretend 
to any benefit from such a maxim." In Massachusetts, similar words in her bill of 
rights of 1780 were held later by her courts to have abolished slavery within her 
limits, though that result was not thought of when the clause was adopted. 



216 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 

By July 1, all delegations except New York's had either 
received positive instructions to vote for independence or 
had at least been released from former restrictions against 
doing so ; and the matter was again taken up. The first 
vote was divided ; but on the next day (July 2) the motion 
for independence was carried by the vote of twelve States. 















rf«.*»^ ^•uo-uT. ^^^'^ "^ ''/il-'-CC- 5%C«*-r- yP-zf*^ )> A.<yrw;^>^>».>v'. J^T-l-tcZ-tv-c*. t^^^clkjudi. 



Original Draft of the Declaration of Independence in Jefferson's hand- 
writing, written, he tells us, "without reference to book or pamphlet." — A 
photograph from a facsimile in the Boston Public Library. 

The formal Declaration, reported by the committee, was 
then considered in detail, and adopted on July 4. On the 
9th, a new (Fourth) Provincial Congress for New York 
gave the assent of that State. 

The delegates from New York had written home for 
instructions (June 10), but the Third New York Convention 
New York's replied that it could not presume to give author- 
" acces- ity. A "Fourth Convention" was called at once, 
to act upon the matter. This was virtually a 
referendum. The new convention did not meet until July 
9, and so the delegates from New York at Philadelphia took 
no part in the votes. 

John Adams regarded the vote of July 2 as the decisive 



"TIMES THAT TRY MEN'S SOULS" 217 

step. On the 3d of July he wrote to his wife : "The second 
day of July, 1776, will be the most memorable epocha in the 
history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be 
celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary 
festival. It ought to be commemorated as the day of 
deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. 
It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, 
games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from 
one end of this continent to the other, from this time 
fore ward forever more." 

Military events in '76 were indecisive. In the spring, 
after nearly a year's siege, Washington forced the English 
out of Boston, but he was unable to prevent their Military 
occupying New York. Defeated badly at Long events in '76 
Island and White Plains, his sadly lessened troops with- 
drew through New Jersey into Pennsylvania ; but a few 
weeks later he cheered the Patriots by the dashing winter 
victories of Trenton and Princeton. In the darkest of the 
dark days before those victories, Thomas Paine xhomas 
thrilled America with The Crisis. This pamphlet Paine's 
was a mighty factor in filling the levies and dis- ^'*^ '^'"'^'* 
pelling despondency. Pages of it were on men's tongues, 
and the opening sentence has passed into a byword, — 
"These are the times that try men's souls." 

II. THE NEW STATE CONSTITUTIONS 

Meantime the revolution in governments went on. Said 
John Adams toward the close of '76, — "The manufacture 
of governments is as much talked of as was the manufacture 
of saltpeter before." In the six months between the Dec- 
laration of Independence and the Battle of Trenton, seven 
States followed Virginia in adopting written constitutions. 
Georgia was hindered for a time by the predomi- 
nance of her Tories ; and New York, because she tions in the 
was held by the enemy. These States followed in Thirteen 
'77. The remaining three States had already set 
up provisional governments. In Massachusetts and New 



218 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 

Hampshire, these remained in force for some years. South 
Carolina adopted a regular constitution in '78. 

Thanks to the poHtical instinct of the people, the in- 
stitution of these new governments, even in the midst of 
war and invasion, was accomplished quietly. As to Vir- 
ginia, Jefferson wrote (August 13, '77), — "The people seem 
to have laid aside the monarchic, and taken up republican 
government, with as much ease as would have attended the 
throwing off an old and putting on a new suit of clothes." 

No one of the first eleven constitutions ums voted on by the 

people. In most cases the "conventions" that adopted 

them had no express authority to do so ; and 

ratification some of tliosc Conventions had been elected months 

outside New before there was any talk of independence. For 

England , , "^ . . ^ . 

the most part, the constitutions were enacted 
precisely as ordinary laws were. In Virginia Jefferson 
urged a referendum on the constitution, arguing that 
otherwise it could be repealed by any legislature, like any 
other statute. But this doctrine was too advanced for 
his State. A "union of mechanics" in New York, too, 
protested vigorously but vainly against the adoption of a 
constitution by a provincial convention without "the in- 
habitants at large" being permitted to "exercise the right 
God has given them ... to approve or reject" it. 

In New England, on the other hand, thanks to the training 
of the town meeting, the sovereignty of the people was 
understood by every artisan and farmer, as elsewhere 
only by lonely thinkers. (The New York "mechanics," 
just quoted, were mainly of New England birth or descent.) 
The legislatures of Rhode Island and Connecticut did adopt 
the old charters as constitutions (without change), without 
reference to the people, because it was held that the people 
had already sanctioned them by long acquiescence. But 
in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, where neio con- 
stitutions ivere to he adopted, there was no serious thought of 
acting without a popular referendum. Indeed, that was 
not enough. The people of these States demanded also a 
popular initiative in the matter. 



NEW STATE CONSTITUTIONS 219 

Throughout the summer of '76, Massachusetts papers 
and pamphlets teemed with projects for a new govern- 
ment. Some of these were fantastic enough to ^j^^ Massa- 
give deHght to critics of democracy. One chusetts 
"farmer" pubhshed a constitution of sixty ar- j^naT"' 
tides, which, he boasted modestly, he had prepared struggle. 
for the commonwealth "between the hours of 10 
A.M. and 2 p.m." Opposition to any executive was common. 
At a slightly later date, one town voted "that it is Our 
Opinniun that we do not want any Goviner but the Guviner 
of the univarse and under him a States Gineral to Consult 
with the wrest of the united stats for the good of the whole." 

September 17 the Assembly asked the towns to authorize 
it to prepare a constitution, "to be made public for the 
inspection and perusal of the inhabitants, before the ratifi- 
cation thereof by the Assembly." This would have let 
the people only make suggestions. Massachusetts would 
not tolerate such a plan, and a general opposition appeared 
to any action whatever by the ordinary legislature. Various 
towns voted to resist the movement until — in the words of 
a Boston resolution — the people should elect "a convention 
for this purpose and this alone.'" Still the next year (May 
5, 1777), the expiring Assembly recommended that its 
successor should be empowered, at the elections, to make a 
constitution. Many towns again refused assent. None the 
less, the new Assembly did venture to submit a constitution to 
the vote of the toivns (February, 1778) ; but less than a tenth 
of the towns approved the document ! 

At last the Assembly was converted. It now asked the 
towns to vote at the next election whether they would em- 
power their delegates in the coming Assembly to call a 
Convention for the sole purpose of forming a constitution. 
The responses were favorable, and a Convention was called 
for September 1, to be chosen as regular Assemblies were. 
That body drew up a constitution which (March 2) was 
submitted to the towns. More than two thirds the towns 
voted to ratify ; and in June, 1780, the constitution went 
into effect. 



220 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 

In New Hampshire a like method was followed ; and, after 
three plans had been rejected, a constitution was ratified 
in 1783. It was many years before this method became 
general outside New England. 

The thirteen constitutions were strikingly alike. This was 
due mainly to the similarity between the preceding colonial 
Similarity governments, but in part to a remarkably active 
of the interchange of ideas among the leaders during the 

thirteen . „ , " -r» p ' i r\ ^ 

constitu- sprmg and summer ot 76. Uetore tfie J^ourth 
tions Virginia Convention Patrick Henry corresponded 

freely with the two Adamses. Members of Congress at 
Philadelphia constantly'' discussed forms of government at 
informal gatherings ; and, on several occasions, delegates 
from distant colonies returned home to take part in consti- 
tution-making. 

All the constitutions were ''republican,'' without a trace 
of hereditary privilege. Nearly all safeguarded the rights 
of the individual by a distinct hill of rights. Most of them 
formally adopted the English Common Law as part of the law 
of the land. Except in Pennsylvania and Georgia (the 
two youngest States) the legislature had two Houses. Penn- 
sylvania kept a plural executive, — a council with one mem- 
ber designated as "president"; but elsewhere the revolu- 
The execu- tiouary committees of safety gave way to a single 
tive weak- ''governor'^ or " president.'' The governors, however, 
^^^ had less power than the old colonial governors. The 

people did not yet clearly see the difference between trusting 
an officer chosen by themselves and one appointed by a dis- 
tant king. New York and Massachusetts, however (the 
eleventh and twelfth States to adopt constitutions), had had 
time to learn the need of a firm executive, and strengthened 
that branch of government somewhat, though they left it 
weaker than is customary to-day. These two States also 
placed the election of the governor in the hands of the people di- 
rectly. That was already the case in Connecticut and Rhode 
Island under the colonial charters. Everywhere else the 
executive was appointed by the legislature. 



NEW STATE CONSTITUTIONS 221 

Everywhere the legislature overshadowed the two other 
branches of government. The judiciary, like the executive, 
was usually chosen by the legislature, and in many supremacy 
cases was removable by executive and legislature of the 
without formal trial. No one yet foresaw, in any- ^^^ ^^^^^ 
thing like its modern extent, the later power of the judiciary 
to declare legislative acts void. The old executive check upon 
the legislature, the absolute veto, notvhere appeared. 
Only two States devised the new qualified veto, to 
be overridden by two thirds of each House, which has since 
become so common. New York gave this veto to governor 
and judiciary acting together, in a "revisionary council"; 
Massachusetts gave it to the governor alone. 

Religious discrimination was common. "Freedom of 
worship"" was generally asserted in the bills of rights; but 
this did not imply our modern separation of Religious 
church and state. Office-holding in several States discrimina- 
was restricted to Protestant Christians, and some *'°"^ 
States kept a specially favored ("established") church. 
The Massachusetts bill of rights provided that all citizens 
should be taxed for church support, but that each man 
should have the right to say to which church in his town or 
village his payment should go. Most places in Massachu- 
setts, however, had only a Congregational church, which, 
therefore, was maintained at public expense. Connecticut 
had a similar plan. 

To-day it is customary to say that the most important 
clause in any constitution — "the constitutional clause" — 
is the one that determines how the document 
may be changed. But half these first constitutions provision 
had no amendment clause whatever. The omis- ^^^ amend- 
sion was due partly to the political inexperience 
of that day ; partly to the vague expectation that, on 
occasion, by a sort of peaceful revolution, the people would 
"recur to fundamental principles" in much the same way 
as in creating the original instruments. Even when an 
attempt was made to define a method of amendment, the 
result was in most cases unsatisfactory. In South Carolina 



222 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 

the legislature gave ninety days' notice (that public opinion 
might be known), and then acted as in passing any law. In 
Maryland, an amendment became part of the constitution 
if passed by two successive legislatures. In Delaware five 
sevenths of one house and seven ninths of the other were 
required to carry an amendment, — which amounted to 
complete prohibition upon constitutional change. In 
Pennsylvania, amendments could be proposed only at 
intervals of seven years, and only in a peculiar and com- 
plicated fashion — which eventually proved unworkable. 
Only Georgia and Massachusetts provided for calling con- 
stitutional conventions in modern fashion. 

Each of the thirteen States excluded a large part of even the 
free White males from voting. Some gave the franchise only 
The limited to thosc who held land, and most of the others de- 
franchise nianded the ownership of considerable taxable prop- 
erty of some kind as a qualification. Even such democratic 
States as Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Georgia, North 
Carolina permitted only taxpayers to vote.^ The country 
over, probably not one White man in four held even the 
lowest degree of the suffrage. Democracy was more praised 
than practiced. 

Another effective aristocratic device was to set up graded 
qualifications for political rights. Commonly, a man had 
to have more property to vote for the upper than 
quaiifica- for the lower House of the legislature. This made 
tions for ^}^^ senates special protectors of property interests, 
rights, and Commonly, too, there was a still higher qualifica- 
indirect ^Jqj^ {qj. sitting in the legislature, — often more 
for the upper House than for the lower, — and 
yet more for a governor. In several States, the upper 
House was chosen by the lower. In Massachusetts, all men 
who could vote for one House could vote for the other also, 

' These four States recognized clearly that democracy demands education. 
They all put into their constitutions a provision for encouraging public education. 
It should be added that Pennsylvania and Georgia were a trifle more liberal with 
the franchise than the compact statement in the text would indicate. The first 
gave the suffrage to the grown-up sons of freeholders, and the second to certain 
classes of skilled artisans, whether taxpayers or not. 



NEW STATE CONSTITUTIONS 223 

but in choosing the senate, the votes were so apportioned 
that a rich man counted for several poor men : the richer 
any part of the State, the more senatorial districts it had. 
North Carolina pretty well lost her democracy in these 
gradations : to vote for a representative, a man had only to 
be a taxpayer; but to vote for senator, he must own 50 
acres of land ; to sit as representative, he must have 100 acres ; 
as senator, 300 acres ; and as governor, £1000 of real estate. 

Here were four ingenious checks upon a dangerously 
encroaching democracy : (1) an upper House so chosen as 
to be a stronghold for the aristocracy ; (2) indirect election 
of the executive and judiciary; (3) property qualifications, 
sometimes graded, for voting ; and (4) higher qualifications 
for holding office. All these had been developed in the colonial 
period. On the whole the new States weakened the checks {and 
no State increased them) ; but every State retained some of 
them. 

This suggests also a curious fact regarding our State 
senates. In the seventeenth century, aristocracy was so 
strong that the aristocratic "Council" (whether elected 
as in Massachusetts, or appointed as in Virginia) dominated 
a one-House Assembly. The change to two Houses ivas set in 
motion everywhere by the democratic element, as a step toward 
greater freedom of action (pages 44, 87). When we reach the 
Revolution, democracy has gained power ; and it was the 
aristocracy which preserved the two-House system, in order 
that property and station might intrench themselves safely in 
the upper House when compelled to surrender the other one. 

Vermont, it is true, was a real democracy ; but she was 
not one of the thirteen colonies, nor did she become a 
State of the Union until 1791. Her territory _ „ 

The Ver- 

had belonged to New York and New Hampshire ; mont de- 
but neither government was satisfactory to the mocracy: 
inhabitants — who were really Connecticut and tion that 
New Hampshire frontiersmen (page 166); and proves the 
during the early Revolutionary disorders, the 
Green Mountain districts set up a government of their own 



224 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 

(adopting, as their hasty statement put it, "the laws of 
God and Connecticut, until we have time to frame better''). 
This "Vermont" was not "recognized" by Congress or by 
any State government ; but, in 1777, it adopted a consti- 
tution with manhood suffrage. 

III. CONGRESS AND THE WAR 

England's task was a difficult one, even if she had had 
only America to deal with. Great Britain had then eight 
Military million people, — or about three times as many as 
problems i\^^ colonics had. But she had to wage war across 
three thousand miles of ocean in an age when it took eight or 
ten weeks to cross and when no ship carried more than four or 
five hundred people. The Americans, too, inhabited a large 
and scattered territory, with no vital centers. To conquer 
it, an invading army must hold much of it at one time. 
At one time or another, English troops held Boston, New 
York, Newport, Philadelphia, Savannah — but never more 
than one or two at once. 

The first great danger to the colonies lay, not in Eng- 
land's strength, but in American disunion. The Revolu- 
Lack of ^^^^ ^^^ more of a civil war than was even the 
union in great " Civil War" of 1861. In 1776 every com- 
Amenca munity was divided, and neighbor warred on 
neighbor. In New York, Pennsylvania, and Georgia the 
Loyalists were a majority, and in the colonies as a whole 
they made at least every third man. They came mainly 
from the commercial, capitalistic, and professional classes, 
always timid regarding change, and from the easy-go- 
ing, well-contented part of society. On the whole, they 
represented respectability and refinement. Society was 
moving rapidly : not all could keep the same pace. In 
July, 1776, the line was drawn. Men who that month stood 
where Washington or Jefferson had stood seven or eight 
months before (page 211) were Tories. 

The other great danger to America was the inefficiency of 
Congress. Even with every third man siding with England, 



CONGRESS AND THE WAR 225 

if we had had a central government able to gather and wield 
our resources, the British armies could have been driven into 
the sea in six months. From their 500,000 able- inefficiency 
bodied White males, the Americans should have °* Congress 
put in the field an army of 100,000 men. But if we leave out 
the militia, which now and again swarmed out for a few days 
to repel a local raid, the Continental forces hardly reached 
a third that number at any time. For the greater part of 
the war, indeed, the American armies numbered only about 
10,000 men, and at times they sank to 5000. 

Even these few were ill-paid, ill-fed, and worse clothed. 
And this, not so much from the poverty of the country, as from 
lack of organization. As John Fiske well says, in referring 
to the dreadful sufferings of Washington's army at Valley 
Forge, which "have called forth the pity and admiration of 
historians" : — 

"The point of the story is lost unless we realize that this misery 
resulted from gross mismanagement rather than from the poverty 
of the country. As the soldiers marched on the seventeenth of 
December to their winter quarters, their route could be traced 
on the snow by the blood that oozed from bare, frost-bitten feet. 
Yet, at the same moment, . . . hogsheads of shoes, stockings, 
and clothing were lying at different places on the route and in 
the woods, perishing for want of teams." 

Fortunately the English commanders were of second or 
third rate ability. Lord North is reported to have said of 
them, — "I don't know whether they frighten the enemy, 
but I am sure they frighten me." Among the Americans, 
the war developed some excellent generals of the second rank, 
— Greene, Arnold, Marion, — but many officers were in- 
competent or self-seeking or treacherous. After the first 
months, the faithful endurance of the common soldier was 
splendid. Said one observer, "Barefoot, he labors through 
Mud and Cold with a Song in his Mouth, extolling War and 
Washington." Yet at times even this soldiery was driven 
to conspiracy or open mutiny by the jealous unwillingness 
of Congress to make provision for their needs in the field or 
for their families at home. 



226 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 

Out of all this murkiness towers one bright and glorious 
figure. Pleading with Congress for justice to his soldiers, 
George shaming or sternly compelling those justly dissatis- 

Washington fjp^j soldiers to their duty, quietly ignoring repeated 
slights of Congress to himself, facing outnumbering forces of 
perfectly equipped veterans when his own army was a mere 
shell, Washington, holding well in hand that fiery temper 
which still, on occasion, could make him swear "like an 
angel from heaven," was always great-minded, dignified, 
indefatigable, steadfastly indomitable ; a devoted patriot ; 
a sagacious statesman ; a consummate soldier, patient to 
wait his chance and daring to seize it : the one indispensable 
man of the Revolution. 

The best excuse for the misrule of Congress was its 
real weakness and its consequent feeling of irresponsibil- 
ity. In all internal matters, it was limited to 
ernment of recommcudations ; and the States grew to regard 
suppiica- j^^g requests more and more lightly. It asked men 
to enlist, offering bounties to those who did 
so ; but often it found its offers outbid by the State govern- 
ments to increase their own troops. It had no power to 
draft men into the ranks : only the State governments 
could do that. So, too, in the matter of finances. Congress 
could not tax: it only called on the States for contributions, 
in a ratio agreed upon. Such contributions, even when 
reinforced by the loans from France, were not more than 
half of the amount necessary to carry on the war. 

At the very beginning. Congress was forced to issue paper 
money. Each scrap of such money was merely an indefinite 
Continental promissory note from Congress to "bearer." In 
currency gy^ years, printing presses supplied Congress with 
$241,000,000 of such ''Continental currency''' ;^ and, with this, 
perhaps $50,000,000 worth of services and supplies were 
bought. (After depreciation began, even with a new issue 
Congress could not get nearly a dollar's worth of supplies for 

* So called to distinguish this currency put forth by the central government 
from similar issues by the States. The State currency amounted to $200,000,000 
more ; but most of it had more value than the Continental paper. 



CONGRESS AND THE WAR 



227 



: • I 

•I 
A- 

4l 






fff % XX Thirty Niu:i;h 



•ij\ Thirty ^[u ;i;! 

YVmili^d i')jl.LARS 

^ Vr Cfe Tilw/Grjj; 



S.^: 



a paper dollar.) Congress itself had no power tocompel people 
to take this currency ; but, at the request of Congress, the 
States made it legal tender. The people, however, had 
little confidence in the promise to repay. In 1776 (when only 
twenty millions had been issued), depreciation set in. In 
1778, a dollar would buy only twelve cents' worth of goods. 
In 1781 Thomas Paine paid $300 for a pair of woolen stock- 
ings, and Jefferson records a fee of $3000 to a physician for 
two visits. "Not worth a continental" became a byword. 
Before the close of 1781, this currency ceased to circulate 
except as speculators bought it up, at perhaps a thousand 
dollars for one in coin. 
A mob used it to "tar 
and feather" a dog; 
and we are told of an 
enterprising barber who 
papered his shop with 
Continental notes. 

All this meant a reign 
of terror in business. 
Men who, in 1775, had 
loaned a neighbor $1000 
in good money were 
compelled, three or four 
years later, to take in 
payment a pile of paper almost without value, but named 
$1000. Prices varied fantastically from one day to an- 
other, and in neighboring localities on" the same day. 
Wages and salaries rose more slowly than prices (as is 
always the case), and large classes of the people suffered 
exceedingly in consequence. 

But it must be remembered that this "cheap money" was 
the only money Congress could get. If a "note" had ever 
been repaid, it would have been in reality a "forced loan." 
Since it never was repaid, it amounted to a tax, or a confisca- 
tion of private property for public uses, — the tax being 
paid, not by one man, but by all the people through whose 
hands it passed. A sold a horse to the government for one 



tim of^3Tt.iTefs,fdf- 

fid a 7Jes -•■,•.":<:•, 









A Continental Bill, from the original in the 
Massachusetts Historical Society Collections. 



228 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 

hundred dollars in paper currency ; when he passed the 
paper on to B, he received perhaps only ninety dollars in 
value for it. Ten dollars had been taken from him by tax, 
or confiscation. B perhaps got only seventy dollars' worth 
for the money; so he had been "taxed" twenty dollars. 
The government had secured the horse for a piece of paper, 
and eventually the horse was paid for by the various people 
in whose hands the paper depreciated. Such taxation was 
horribly wasteful and demoralizing; but it was the only 
kind of tax to which the people would have submitted in the 
amount required. Without the paper money, the Revolu- 
tion could not have been won. 

The critical years of the war were '77 and '78. In 1777 
Howe invaded Pennsylvania. Washington maneuvered his 
The War inferior forces admirably. He retreated when he 
in '77-78 j^^^j iq . ^^s robbcd of a splendidly deserved, de- 
cisive victory at Germantown only by a mixture of chance 
and a lack of veteran discipline in his soldiers ; and, after 
spinning out the campaign for months, went into winter 
quarters at Valley Forge — then to grow famous for heroic 
suffering. Howe had won the empty glory of capturing " the 
Rebel Capital," — where he now settled down to a winter 
of feasting and dancing ; but Washington had decoyed him 
from his chance to make safe Burgoyne's invasion from 
Canada, and so crush the American cause. Lacking the ex- 
Burgoyne's pected cooperation from the south, Burgoyne 
capture proved Unable to secure the line of the Hudson, 

and was forced to surrender to the incompetent Gates. 

This capture of an entire English army turned the waver- 
ing policy of France into firm alliance with America against 
her ancient rival. From the first, the French government 
had furnished the Americans with money and supplies, 
secretly and indirectly ; and many adventurous young 
noblemen like Lafayette, imbued with the new liberal 
philosophy of Rousseau, had volunteered for service under 
Washington. Franklin had been acting as the American 
agent in Paris for some months without formal recognition. 



CONGRESS AND THE WAR 229 

Now he quickly secured a treaty of alliance that recognized 
the independence of the United States. The possessions of 
the two allies in America were mutually guaran- The French 
teed ; and it was agreed that peace with England alliance 
should be made only after consultation and approval by 
both allies.^ 

France drew Spain in her train ; and, soon after, England 
quarreled with Holland. Without an ally, England found 
herself facing not merely her own colonies, but the three 
greatest naval powers of the world (next to herself), while 
most of the rest of Europe, under the lead of Russia, held 
toward her an attitude of "armed neutrality" — which 
meant instant readiness for hostility. 

In America, however, the darkest months of the war were 
those between the victory over Burgoyne and the news of 
the French alliance. The first flush of enthusiasm The dark 
was spent. The infamous Conway Cabal (among ^^^^ ^° "^^ 
officers and Congressmen) threatened to deprive the country 
of Washington's services. Nearly a fifth of the starving army 
deserted to the well-fed enemy in Philadelphia, and another 
fifth could not leave their winter huts for want of clothing. 
Washington himself, as his private letters show, was so 
depressed by "the spirit of disaffection" in the country that 
he felt "the game is pretty near up." The paper money, 
issued by Congress in constantly increasing volume — the 
chief means of paying the soldiers and securing supplies — 
was nearly valueless. Foreign trade was impossible be- 
cause England commanded the sea ; and domestic industry 
of all sorts was at a standstill because of the demoralization 
of the currency. To large numbers of patriots, even the 
news of the new ally was of doubtful cheer. Many began 
to fear that they had only exchanged the petty annoyances 

^ Large sections of the French people felt a genuine enthusiasm for America, 
but to the despotic French government the alliance was purely a "League of 
Hatred." Especially did the French government fear that if England and her 
colonies again united, they would do away with all occasion for the troublesome 
"Sugar Act" by seizing the French West Indies. Spain and Holland were never 
our allies : they were the allies of France. The treaty with France is the only 
alliance America has ever formed. 



230 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 

of English rule for the slavery of French despotism and of 
the Spanish Inquisition. 

Two results of the French treaty followed close upon its 
announcement. (1) The English general was ordered to 
evacuate Philadelphia and concentrate forces at New York. 
The watchful Washington was close upon the rear of the 
retreating army, but at Monmouth his strategy and dash 
were again robbed of the fruit of victory, — this time by 
the misconduct or treason of General Charles Lee. • (2) 

Lord North sent commissioners to America with 
" oUve an " olive branch " proposition : all the contentions 

^^f^'^\ of the Americans, previous to July 4, 1776, would 

be granted, together with a universal amnesty, if 
they would return to their allegiance. By a unanimous 
vote. Congress refused to consider propositions "so de- 
rogatory to the honor of an independent nation." 

In the northern states no British army of consequence 
again appeared in the field ; and Washington's forces there 
The war in were small. Except for minor operations, the war 
'79-'80 ^^g transferred to the South, with swift alterna- 

tions of success and failure through 1779 and 1780. In both 
North and South, after the summer of '78, the struggle took 
on a new character. It became a "war of desolation," — a 
succession of sudden raids, to harry and distress a country- 
side or to burn a town or port, varied by occasional bloody 
and vindictive combats like those at Cowpens and King's 

Mountain. A terrible feature of some of these 
use of raids was the use of Indian allies by the English. 

Indian g^j^ [i must be remembered that the Americans had 

first tried to secure such allies. Both Washington 
and J.ohn Adams had favored their enlistment. Mont- 
gomery had some Indians in the army with which he invaded 
Canada, and there were a few in the American army besieging 
Boston in 1775. It had been intended to use the friendship 
of the natives for the French in order to draw them into a 
force under Lafayette. The simple fact is that Indians 
had been used by both sides in America in all the inter- 



CONGRESS AND THE WAR 231 

colonial wars, and both parties in this new contest continued 
their use so far as possible ; but the natives saw truly that 
the real enemy of their race was the American settler, and 
therefore turned against him. 

The Loyalists who had been driven from their homes in 
Boston and Philadelphia with the retirement of the British 
forces, together with those living near the British The 
stronghold of New York, enrolled themselves in LoyaUsts 
large numbers under the English flag. New York State alone 
furnished 15,000 recruits to the English army, besides 8000 
more Loyalist militia. At some important periods, more 
Americans were under arms against independence than for it. 
Because of their knowledge of the country, these Tory troops 
were used freely in harrying expeditions. In consequence, 
the attitude of the Whig governments. State and local, 
toward even the passive sympathizers with England, became 
ferocious. Those unhappy men who had long since been 
deprived of their votes were now excluded from professions 
and many other employments, forbidden to move from place 
to place, ruined by manifold fines, drafted into the army, 
imprisoned on suspicion, sometimes deported with their 
families in herds to distant provinces, and constantly ex- 
posed to the most horrible forms of mob violence. If they 
succeeded in escaping to the British lines, their property 
was confiscated (oftentimes to enrich grafting speculators 
at corruptly managed sales), and they themselves, by hun- 
dreds at a time, were condemned to death in case of return 
or recapture, — not by judicial trials, but, without a hear- 
ing, by bills of attainder.^ In 1778 Massachusetts, by 
one Act, banished 310 "peaceful" Tories. More than sixty 
of these were Harvard graduates, and the list, says the 

^ A "bill of attainder" is a legislative act imposing penalties upon one or more 
individuals. The legislature condemns, not the courts ; and of course the accused 
lose all the ordinary securities against injustice. Such bills had been used occasion- 
ally in English history. By our constitution of 1787, bills of attainder are wholly 
forbidden. Until the adoption of that instrument, however, many States did pass 
such bills against prominent Tories, — sometimes against great numbers of them 
at once. An attempt was made in the Virginia bill of rights to prohibit such 
bills ; but Patrick Henry urged that they might be indispensable in that time of 
war. Some States did incorporate the prohibition in their first bill of rights. 



232 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 

sturdy American, Moses Coit Tyler, reads "like the bead- 
roll of the oldest and noblest families concerned in the found- 
ing and upbuilding of New England civilization." 

Seemingly, the war had settled down to a test of endur- 
ance. Campaigns in Europe and the West Indies drained 
England's resources, glorious though the results were to 
her arms against those tremendous odds. Meantime, in 
America, Congress kept its sinking finances afloat by 
generous gifts and huge loans from France. The army, 
however, was dangerously discontented. Desertions to the 
enemy rose to a hundred or two hundred a month. 

Suddenly an unexpected chance offered. Washington, 
ever ready, grasped at it, and this time no evil fate inter- 
The capture vened. With the indispensable cooperation of the 
of Corn- French army and fleet, Cornwallis and his army 
^*^*^ were cooped up in Yorktown. With his surrender 

(October 19, 1781) war virtually closed, though peace was 
not signed for many months. 

While peace negotiations dragged along in Europe, came 
one more famous episode in America. This was Washington's 
Washington '' Neivburg Address."" The pay of the army was 
atNewburg years behind, and Congress showed no wish to 
settle the matter. Taking advantage of the soldiers' bitter 
discontent, a group of officers in the camp at Newburg 
formed a plan to get better government by making Washing- 
ton king. This proposition Washington at once repulsed, 
with grieved anger ; but still an anonymous committee called 
a meeting of officers to find some way of forcing Congress to 
act while the army still had arms in their hands. A conflict 
that would have sullied the beginning of the new nation's 
career was averted only by the tact and unrivaled influence 
of Washington. He anticipated the meeting of the officers 
by calling an earlier one himself, at which he prevailed upon 
their patriotism to abandon all forms of armed compulsion ; 
and then he finally induced Congress to pay five years' 
salary in government certificates, worth perhaps twenty 
cents on the dollar, — a meager return, but perhaps all 
that the demoralized government was equal to. 



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THE TREATY OF PARIS IN 1783 233 

IV. THE PEACE TREATY OF 1783 

The negotiations for peace were carried on from Paris, 
with Franklin, John Jay, and John Adams to represent the 
United States. In spite of King George, the fall Peace ne- 
of Yorktown overthrew Lord North's ministry ; gotiations 
and the new English government contained statesmen 
friendly to America, such as Fox, Rockingham, and Shel- 
burne (page 183). This fact and the remarkable ability of the 
American negotiators resulted in a treaty marvelously ad- 
vantageous. England could not well avoid conceding Ameri- 
can independence, but Shelburne meant to do it in generous 
fashion. He intended not merely peace, he said, but " recon- 
ciliation with America, on the noblest terms and by the 
noblest means." 

The critical question concerned territory. Just before 
the war (1769), a few Virginians had crossed the western 
mountains to settle in fertile lands between the Ohio -j-j^^ signif- 
and Cumberland rivers, in what we now call Ken- icanceof the 
tucky and Tennessee ; and, during the war itself, ®^* 
many thousands had established homes in that region. From 
the Kentucky settlements, George Rogers Clark, a Virginia 
officer, in incredibly daring campaigns (1778-1779), had cap- 
tured from England the old French posts Kaskaskia and 
Cahokia, on the Mississippi, and Vincennes on the Wabash. 
While preparing for this expedition in 1777, Clark had re- 
ceived a letter of encouragement from Thomas Jefferson, who, 
even so early, felt keenly the importance of the West. " Much 
solicitude," he wrote, "will be felt for the outcome of your 
expedition. ... If successful, it will have an important 
bearing in establishing our northeastern boundary." This 
prophecy was now fulfilled. The conquered district con- 
tained only French settlers, but it had been organized, like 
Kentucky, as a Virginia county. The Americans, therefore, 
had ground for claiming territory to the Mississippi, and 
such extension of territory was essential to our future 
development. England, however, at first expected us to 
surrender this thinly settled western region in return for the 



234 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 

evacuation of New York, Charleston, and other cities still 
held by her armies. Moreover, France and Spain secretly 
France intended that the treaty should shut up our new 

means to nation between the Atlantic and the Appalachians, 
West to leaving the southwest to Spain and the Indians, 
England g^j^,^ handing back to England the northwest, which 
legally had been part of Canada (note on page 201). By the 
treaty of 1778, we were bound to make no peace without the 
consent of France, and our commissioners had been strictly 
instructed by Congress to act only with the advice of Vergennes, 
the French minister. But Jay and Adams suspected Ver- 
gennes of bad faith, and finally persuaded Franklin to disre- 
gard the instructions. France had no desire to injure 
America, but she had no objection to leaving it helpless and 
dependent upon her favor ; and she did wish to satisfy her ally 
Spain, whom she had dragged into the war. The story goes 
that, while Franklin and Jay were discussing the situation, 
Franklin asked in surprise, "What! would you break your 
instructions.'*" "As I break this pipe," said Jay, throwing 
his pipe into the fireplace. Franklin had rendered incalcu- 
lable diplomatic service to his country, but his long and in- 
timate relations with the French government had 

aIQGI*1C9.I1 

negotiators Unfitted him for an independent course in this crisis. 
^^^^^ *,^® At all events, with patriotic daring, the American 
commissioners did enter into secret negotiations 
with England, and secured terms which Vergennes could not 
well refuse to approve when the draft of the treaty was 
placed before him. 

By this Treaty of 1783, England acknowledged the independ- 
ence of the United States, with territory reaching to the Missis- 
^, ^ sippi, and from the Great Lakes to Florida. She 

The Treaty ^^ :' . • , • i i 

gave up without consideration, not only tne sea- 
coast cities she held, but also the Northwest posts, which had 
never been seen by an American army, She also granted to 
the Americans the right to share in the Newfoundland fish- 
eries, from which other foreign nations were shut out. In re- 
turn, the American Congress recommended to the various 
States a reasonable treatment of the Loyalists, and promised 



THE MEANING TO THE WORLD 235 

solemnly (a matter which should have gone without saying) 
that no State should interpose to prevent Englishmen from 
recovering in American courts the debts due from Americans 
before the war. No wonder that the chagrined Vergennes 
wrote: "The English buy the peace, rather than make 
it. . . . Their concessions regarding boundaries, fisheries, 
and the Loyalists exceed anything I had thought possible." 
The American negotiators told the English commissioners 
frankly that the "recommendation" regarding the Loyalists 





^^^^S 




^jTixmmr^-mm^^^ :=:£:: ^ 



The Swokds of Colonel William Prescott and Captain John Linzee, who fought 
on opposite sides at Bunker Hill. A grandson of Prescott and a granddaughter 
of Linzee married, and the offspring of this marriage mounted the swords in 
this way "in token of international friendship and family alliance." They are 
now in the rooms of the Massachusetts Historical Society. 

would carry no weight. England herself afterwards appro- 
priated large sums of money to compensate partially that 
unfortunate class of exiles. 

The territorial advantages, however, were not fully en- 
joyed by the United States for some twelve years. When the 
English forces evacuated the American seaports, they carried 
away a few hundred Negroes, who, they claimed, had become 
free by aiding them during the war, and whom they would 
not now surrender to their old masters. The American 
State governments made this a pretext for deliberately 
breaking one of the most reasonable articles of the treaty, 
— that regarding British debts. Despite the pledged faith 
of the central government, State after State passed laws 
to prevent the collection of such debts in their courts. 
Meantime, the Americans had not at first been ready to take 
over the posts on the Great Lakes ; and when they desired 
to do so, England refused to surrender them, because of 
these infractions of the treaty. 



236 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 

The "Revolution" covers twenty years, twelve of wran- 
gling and eight of war (1763-1775, 1775-1783). It created 
_. the first American state. It helped to make the 

The mean- ^ _ ^ ^ 

ing of the colonial poHcy of all European countries more en- 
Revoiution lightened. It "laid the foundation for the French 
Revolution," as Arthur Young said in 1789, and so helped 
modify profoundly the internal character of Europe. It 
helped tremendously to start England herself — a little later 

— on her splendid march toward democracy. Whatever their 
blunders, the Americans had "warred victoriously for the 
right in a struggle whose outcome vitally affected the whole 
human race." With a generosity possible only to a great 
English people, the English have long recognized this truth, 
generous and, with amazing frankness and emphasis, have 

®® ^^^ taught it to their children even in the elementary 

schools for forty years past. This is why the last two gen- 
erations of Englishmen have been so much more friendly 
toward America than most Americans are toward England 

— until during the World War they came to adopt July 
Fourth quite as an English red-letter day, celebrating it in 
regular American fashion. 

Perhaps it is a trifle easier for Englishmen to do this be- 
cause after all England came out of the Revolutionary War 

with military glory little tarnished. She had been 
and the fighting all Europe as well as America, and only 
war in [y^ America had the struggle gone against her. 

Says Theodore Roosevelt: "England, hemmed in 
by the ring of her foes, fronted them with a grand courage. 
In her veins the Berserker blood was up, and she hailed each 
new enemy with grim delight. Single handed, she kept them 
all at bay. ... So with bloody honor, she ended the most 
disastrous war she had ever waged." 



PART IV — THE MAKING OF THE SECOND WEST 

The West is the most American part of America. . . . What Europe 
is to Asia, what Eyigland is to the rest of Europe, what America is to Eng- 
land, — that the western States and Territories are to the eastern States. — 
James Bryce. 

CHAPTER XII 

THE SOUTHWEST: SELF-DEVELOPED 

The land between the Appalachians and the Missis- 
sippi had passed from France to England in 1763 (page 137). 
Some six thousand French settlers remained in the ^j^g ^^g^ 
district, in three nearly equal groups : (1) about from 1763 
Detroit; (2) near Vincennes; (3) at the "Missis- *° ""^^ 
sippi towns," Kaskaskia and Cahokia. For several years 
more these were the only White settlers. The whole district 
had been included in old grants to the seaboard colonies. 
But as soon as England got control, a Royal Proclamation for- 
bade English speaking colonists to settle west of the mountains, 
and instructed colonial governors to make no land-grants there; 
and in 1774 parliament annexed the territory, as far south as 
the Ohio, to the old French province of Quebec (page 201, 
note). The government dreaded Indian wars — sure to 
follow the advance of the frontiersman — and it was in- 
fluenced by commercial companies that wished to keep the 
vast Mississippi valley as a fur trade preserve. 

But even had England remained in control, the attempt to 
shut out English-speaking settlers was doomed to certain 
failure. How the Scotch-Irish and Germans had made a 
first "West" in the long valleys of the Appalachians soon 
after 1700 has been told. A half century or so later their 
Americanized sons and grandsons were ready to make a 
greater and truer West in the eastern half of the valley of the 

237 



238 MAKING THE SECOND "WEST" 

Mississippi. Those restless border farmers had begun to 
feel crowded in their narrow homes. For some years, stray 
hunters, who had ventured as far west as the great river, 
stirred the Appalachian frontier with romantic stories of 
the wonders and riches of the vast central basin, and just 
before the Revolution a few hardy families pushed the line 
of American settlement across the mountains. 

This movement into the second "West " (the Southwest) 
grew all through the Revolution. It is natural for us to think 
Settlement of the years 1775-1783 as given wholly to patriotic 
of the ^ar for political independence. But during just 

during the thosc years thousands of earnest Americans turned 
Revolution away from that contest to win industrial independ- 
ence for themselves and their children beyond the mountains. 
While the old Atlantic sections were fighting England, a 
new section sprang into being, fighting Indians and the 
wilderness. 

Until the peace of 1783, settlement penetrated only into 
the "dark and bloody ground" between the Ohio and its 
The " dark southern branches. This district had long been 
and bloody a famous hunting ground, where Indians of the 
ground north and of the south slew the bison and one 

another. Frequent war parties flitted along its trails, but no 
tribe claimed it for actual occupation. So here lay the line 
of least resistance to the on-pushing wave of settlement. 

In 1769 a few Virginia frontiersmen moved their fami- 
lies into the valley of the Watauga, one of the headwaters 

of the Tennessee. They thought themselves still 
Watauga in Virginia, and in the spring of 1771 they were 
settlement, joined by fugitive Regulators from North Carolina. 

The same summer, however, a surveyor ran out 
the southern boundary of Virginia and found that Watauga 
lay in territory claimed by North Carolina. That colony 
was in no condition to care for so inaccessible a section, nor 
would the Watauga settlers submit to her rule. Instead they 
set up for themselves. Communication with Virginia was 
possible, because the long valleys trending to the northeast 
ran near together as they entered that State. But a hundred 



WATAUGA, 1769-1772 



239 



miles of forest-clad mountains, without a trail fit even for a 
pack horse, divided Watauga from the nearest settlements in 
North Carolina. ^Yatauga itself lay with mountains to the 
west, as well as to the east ; but its water communication 








/f^jr* road'* \\ ilkesboro 
\>'"^^'' N O _ R T ? H 

'■* 
N 




Western Settlemext, 17ij9-17.'54. 

with the Mississippi justifies us in regarding it as part of the 
land "west of the mountains." 

Two leaders stand forth in this westward movement into 
Tennessee, — James Robertson and John Sevier. Robertson 
was a mightv hunter who had spied out the land 

13.11168 

to find a better home for his family. A backwoods- Robertson 
man born, a natural leader with splendid qualities and John 
of heart and head, he had learned "letters and to 
spell" after marriage, from his wife. Sevier was a "gentle- 
man " of old Huguenot family and of some culture. He was 
the most dashing figure of the early frontier, — a daring 
Indian fighter and an idolized statesman among his rough 
companions, well portrayed in Churchill's The Crossing. 

The essential ihing about Watauga, however, was not 
its leaders, but the individuality and democracy of the whole 
'population. Immigrants came in little groups of families, 
those from Carolina by a long detour through Virginia. No 



240 MAKING THE SECOND "WEST" 

wagon roads pointed west ; and it was a generation more 
before the white, canvas-covered wagon (afterward famihar 
as the "prairie schooner") becaine the token of the im- 
migrant. At best, the early Southwest had only dim and 
rugged trails through the forests ("traces" blazed by the 
hatchet on tree trunks). Along such trails, men, rifle al- 
ways in hand, led pack horses loaded with young children 
and a few necessary supplies ; while the women and older 
children drove the few lean cattle. 

By 1772 the settlers were grouped about thirteen 
"stations." A "station" was a stockaded fort such as 
The stock- ^^ shown on page 166. One side was formed by 
aded a TOW of log huts, facing in. The remaining 

^**°'^ sides, with a log "blockhouse" at each corner, 
were a close fence of hewn "pickets," considerably higher 
than a man's head, driven firmly into the ground and bound 
together. Within were supply sheds for a short siege, and 
sometimes a central and larger blockhouse, — a sort of inner 
"keep." Stockade and blockhouses were loopholed at con- 
venient intervals for rifles, and, except for surprise or fire, 
such a fort was impregnable against any attack without 
cannon. 

The fort, however, was only for times of extraordinary 
danger. Ordinarily, the families lived apart, each in its log 
And the cabin upon its own farm. The holdings were 
homes usually of from four hundred to a thousand acres ; 

but for many years they remained forest-covered, except for 
a small stump-dotted "clearing," about each cabin. The 
clearings nearest one another were often separated by miles 
of dense primitive forest. At an alarm of Indians, all families 
of a "station" abandoned these scattered homes and sought 
refuge within the stockade. In more peaceful times, 
"neighbors," from many miles around, gathered to a 
"house-raising" for a newcomer or for some one whose old 
home had been destroyed by fire. The two qualities that 
especially characterized this new West, says Theodore 
Roosevelt, were ''capacity for self-help and capacity for 
combination." 



BOONE IN KENTUCKY, 1769-1774 241 

In the spring of 1772 the men of the thirteen forts 
gathered at Robertson's station in mass meeting, to organize 
a government. This meeting adopted Articles of 
Association, — "a written constitution, the first ever watauga 
adopted west of the mountains, or by a community Assoda- 
of American-born freemen." (The Fundamental 
Orders of Connecticut had been formed, of course, by Eng- 
lish-nur\ured men.) Manhood suffrage and absolute religious 
freedom were main features of this social compact, — amazing- 
facts when we remember how far short of such democracy fell 
the Revolutionary constitutions of the Eastern States four or 
five years later. A representative convention of thirteen, one 
from each station, chose a "court" of five members who 
formed the government. This body of commissioners held 
regular meetings and managed affairs with little regard 
for legal technicalities, but with sound sense. For six 
years Watauga was an independent political commimity. 
Then, in 1778, when the Revolution had reformed North 
Carolina, Watauga recognized the authority of that State 
and became Washington County. 

The second group of Western settlements — almost as early 
as Watauga — was made in Kentucky. Among the many dar- 
ing hunters and Indian fighters, who, preceding Daniel 
settlement, had ventured from time to time into the Boone in 
bloody Indian hunting grounds south of the Ohio, ^^^^^ ^ 
Daniel Boone was the most famous. As early as 1760, Boone 
hunted west of the mountains ; and in 1769 (the year Watauga 
was founded) he went on a "long hunt" there with six com- 
panions. After five weeks' progress through the forest 
stretching continuously from the Atlantic, this little party 
broke through its western fringe and stood upon the verge 
of the vast prairies of America. They had come to the now 
famous "blue-grass" district of Kentucky. Hitherto (ex- 
cept for petty Indian clearings) American colonists had had 
to win homes slowly with the ax from the stubborn forest. 
Now before the eyes of these explorers there spread away 
a lovely land, where stately groves and running waters 
intermingled with rich open prairies and grassy meadows. 



242 



MAKING THE SECOND "WEST" 



inviting the husbandman to easy possession and teeming 
with game for the hunter, — herds of bison, elk, and deer, 
as well as bear and wolves and wild turkey, in abun- 
dance unguessed before by English-speaking men. The 
prairies proper, even when reached, did not at first attract 

settlers. The lack of fuel 
and often of water more 
than made up for the diffi- 
culty of clearing forest land. 
But Kentucky offered a 
happy mixture. 

In the following months, 
hard on the trail of the 
hunters, followed various 
small expeditions of back- 
woods surveyors and 
would-be settlers, in spite 
of frequent death by the 
scalping knife and at the 
stake. Very soon the colo- 
nist learned that the Woods 
Indian of the West — armed 
now almost as well as the 
Whites — was a far more 
formidable foe than the 
weak tribes of the coast had 
been. But the colonist of 
1770, too, was a far more 
effective forest fighter than 
the English settler of 1620, 
and was not affrighted. In 
particular, Boone returned again and again, and, in 1773, 
he sold his Carolina home, to settle in the new land of 
promise. His expedition was repulsed, however, 
by a savage Indian attack, and the next year the 
opening of a great Indian War along the Virgin- 
ian and Pennsylvania border drove every settler out of 
Kentucky. 




A "Boone Tree," on Boone's Creek, 
Tennessee. The inscription reads : D. 
Boon cilled A Bar on this tree year 1760. 



" Lord Dun 
mores 
War," 1774 



LORD DUNMORE'S WAR, 1774 



243 



This was " Lord Dunmore' s War.'' Without provocation, 
a dastard White trader had murdered the helpless family of 
Logan, a friendly Iroquois chieftain. In horrible retaliation 
a mighty Indian confederacy was soon busied with torch and 
tomahawk on the western frontiers. Pennsylvania suffered 
most, and the dilatory government there did little to 
protect its citizens. Vir- 
ginia, however, acted 
promptly. To crush the 
confederacy she sent an 
army far beyond her line 
of settlement, into the 
distant Northwest, — 
where she claimed juris- 
diction, though parlia- 
ment had just annexed 
the territory to Quebec 
(page 201). This Vir- 
ginian force was com- 
posed chiefly of hardy 
frontier riflemen, with 
deerskin hunting shirts 
for uniform, but, by a 
curious contrast, it was 
led by an English earl, 
the royal governor, I/ord 
Dunmore. 

The rear division of the army, when about to cross the 
Ohio at the mouth of the Kanawha, was surprised, through 
the splendid generalship of the Indian leader g^^^jg ^^ 
Cornstalk, by the whole force of the natives ; but, the Great 
after a stubborn pitched battle, the frontiersmen ^'^^^ ^ 
won a decisive victory. This Battle of the Great Kanawha 
is as important as any conflict ever waged between Whites 
and Redmen. Says Theodore Roosevelt: "It so cowed 
the northern Indians that for two or three years they made 
no organized attempt to check the White advance. . . . 
[It] gave opportunity for Boone to settle in Kentucky and, 




Daniel Boone at 85 (in 1819), when he had 
moved on to frontier Missouri. From a por- 
trait by Chester Harding, now in the Filson 
Club, Louisville, Kentucky. 



244 MAKING THE SECOND "WEST" 

therefore, for Robertson to settle Middle Tennessee, and for 
Clark to conquer Illinois and the Northwest. It was the 
first link in the chain of causes that gave us for our western 
boundary in 1783 the Mississippi and not the Alleghenies." 

Permanent settlement in central Kentucky began the 
next spring (1775). For a few months it had the form of a 
Henderson proprietary colony. A certain Henderson, a citi- 
and zen of North Carolina, bought from the southern 

entuc y Indians their rights to a great tract in central 
Kentucky and Tennessee. He named the proposed colony 
Transylvania, and secured Boone as his agent. In March 
and April, Boone and a strong company marked out the 
Wilderness Road^ and began to build "Boone's Fort " (p. 166) . 
Henderson soon arrived with a considerable colony. But 
the Revolution ruined all prospect of English sanction for 
his proprietary claims, and Virginia firmly asserted her title 
to the territory. Henderson soon passed from the scene; 
and, in 1777, Kentucky, with its present bounds, was or- 
ganized as a county of Virginia. 

Kentucky already contained several hundred fighting 
men, and now it became the base from which George Rogers 
Clark conquered the Northwest (page 233). Before the 
close of the Revolution, Kentucky's population exceeded 
25,000 ; and when peace made Indian hostility less likely, 
a still larger immigration began to crowd the Wilderness 
Road and the Ohio. 

Meanwhile Watauga had become a mother of a still more 
western colony. Population had increased rapidly, and 
some of the earlier "forts" had grown into strag- 
beriand gling villages. At the end of ten years, this 
settlements, region was no longer a place for frontiersmen ; and, 
in 1779, Robertson, with some of his more rest- 
less neighbors, migrated once more to a new wilderness 

^ This famous Wilderness Road was for many years merely a narrow bridle 
path, through the more passable parts of the forest and across the easiest fords, 
leading two hundred miles from the Holston River (near Watauga) into central 
Kentucky. In the worse places the thick underbrush was cut out; but much 
of the time only the direction was blazed on trees. 



THE CUMBERLAND SETTLEMENTS 245 

home in west-central Tennessee, on the bend of the Cum- 
berland. 

These ''Cumberland settlements'' were the third group of 
English-speaking colonists in the Southwest. Population 
thronged into the fertile district, with the usual proportion 
of undesirable frontier characters ; and the settlers found 
it needful at once to provide a government. May 1, 1780, 
a convention of representatives at Nasliboro adopted a 
constitution, — which, however, was styled by the makers 
merely "a temporary method of restraining the licentious." 
A few days later, this "social compact" was signed by 
every adult male settler, 256 in number. It provided for 
a court of twelve "judges," chosen by manhood suffrage in 
the several stations. If dissatisfied with its representative, 
a station might at any time hold a new election (the modern 
"recall"). Like the early Watauga "commissioners," the 
"judges" exercised all powers of government. The con- 
stitution, however, expressly recognized the right of North 
Carolina to rule the district when she should be ready ; and 
in 1783 that State organized the Cumberland settlements 
into Davidson Covmty. 

A year later (1784) North Carolina ceded her western 
lands to the Continental Congress. The Westerners com- 
plained loudly that the mother-State had cast 
them off, and that the dilatory Congress was not " state " 
ready to accept them. The three counties of °^ Frank- 
eastern Tennessee (about Watauga) now num- 
bered 10,000 people. August 23, 1784, a representative 
convention of forty delegates declared this district an in- 
dependent State with the name FranJdand ("Land of the 
Free"). A later convention adopted a constitution, and 
a full state government was set up, with Sevier as governor. 
But North Carolina "repealed" her cession (Congress not 
having acted) ; and after some years of struggle that rose 
even into war, she succeeded in restoring her authority over 
the district. (The first legislature of Frankland fixed a 
currency "in kind" : a pound of sugar was to pass as one 
shilling ; a fox or raccoon skin for two shillings ; a gallon 



246 MAKING THE SECOND "WEST" 

of peach brandy for three shilhngs, and so on. Easterners 
laughed contemptuously at this "money which cannot be 
counterfeited," forgetting how their fathers had used Hke 
currency.) 

For some years, only feeble ties held the Western settle- 
ments to the Atlantic States. The men of the West made con- 
Separatist tiuuous efforts for Statehood ; but these efforts 
tendencies Were opposed both by Virginia and North Caro- 
es Y[j^^ and also by Congress. Then, at one time or 
another, in each of the three groups of settlements, these 
legitimate attempts merged obscurely into less justifiable 
plots for complete separation from the Eastern confederacy. 
For even this extreme phase of the movement, there was 
great provocation in the gross neglect shown by the East 
toward pressing needs in the West. The older States had 
just rebelled against the colonial policy of Great Britain, 
but they showed a strong inclination to retain a selfish policy 
toward their own "colonies." Even in the matter of pro- 
tection against Indians, they hampered the frontier without 
giving aid. The Westerners made many petitions (1) to 
control directly their own militia; ('2) to be divided into 
smaller counties — with courts more accessible; and (3) to 
Eastern have a "court of appeal" established on their side 
neglect and of the mountains. Many a poor man found legal 
jea ousy pedress for wrong impossible because a richer op- 
ponent could appeal to a seaboard supreme court. These 
reasonable requests were refused by North Carolina, and 
granted only grudgingly by Virginia. More distant Eastern 
communities, too, notably New England, manifested a harsh 
jealousy of the West. 

In particular the East long neglected to secure for the new 
West the right to use the loirer Mississippi. For nearly all 
The demand its course, ouc bank of the Mississippi was Ameri- 
forthe (,.^,-1. b^it })y the treaties of 1783, toward the 

mouth of 11111 in • y 

the Mis- mouth Doth banks were Spams. Accordmg to 
sissippi ti^g commercial policy of past ages, Spain could 

close against us this commercial outlet. But the sur- 
plus farm produce of the West could not be carried to 



SEPARATIST MOVEMENTS IN THE SOUTHWEST 247 

the East over bridlepaths. Without some route to the 
outside world, it was valueless ; and the only possible route 
in that day was the huge arterial system of natural water- 
ways to the Gulf. So, from the first, the backwoodsmen 
floated their grain and stock in flatboats down the smaller 
streams to the Ohio, and so on down the great central river 
to New Orleans. They encountered shifting shoals, hidden 
snags, treacherous currents, savage ambuscades, and the 
hardships and dangers of wearisome return on foot through 
tlie Indian-haunted forests. These natural perils the 
frontiersman accepted light-heartedly ; but he was moved 
to bitter wrath, when — his journey accomplished — fatal 
harm befell him at his port. He had to have "right of 
deposit" at New Orleans, in order to reship to ocean vessels. 
Spanish governors granted or withheld that privilege at 
pleasure — to extort bribes or gratify a grudge. 

Our government showed little eagerness in this life-or- 
death matter; but the West seethed with furious demands 
for possession of the mouth of the Mississippi. How to get 
it mattered little. The Westerners would help Congress win 
it from Spain ; or they were ready to try to win it by them- 
selves, setting up, if need be, as a separate nation ; or some 
of them were ready even to buy the essential privilege by 
putting their settlements under the Spanish flag. The last 
measure was never discussed publicly ; but Sevier, Robert- 
son, and Clark were all at some time concerned secretly in 
dubious negotiations with Spanish agents. American 
nationality was just in the making. It was natural for 
even good men to look almost exclusively to the welfare 
of their own section, and the action of these great leaders 
does not expose them to charges of lack of patriotism in any 
shameful sense, — as would be the case in a later day. 
These men must not be confounded with a fellow like 
General Wilkinson, who while an American officer, took a 
pension from Spain for assisting her interests in the West. 
Still it was well that, about 1790, they were statehood 
pushed aside by a new generation of immigrants, secured 
who were able to "think continen tally." Virginia and 



248 



MAKING THE SECOND 'WEST 



North Carolina, too, were finally persuaded to give up their 
claims. In 1792 Kentucky became a State of the Union, 
and, four years later, Tennessee was admitted. The re- 
maining lands south of the Ohio that had been ceded by 
that time to the United States were then organized as the 
Mississippi Territory. 



CHAPTER XIII 

THE NORTHWEST: A NATIONAL DOMAIN 

The Southwest, we have seen, was a self-developed section. 
Except for Henderson's futile project, there was no paternal- 
ism. No statesman planned its settlements ; no general 
directed the conquest of territory ; no older government. 
State or Federal, fostered development. The land was won 
from savage man and savage nature by little bands of self- 
associated backwoodsmen, piece by piece, from the Watauga 
to the Rio Grande, in countless bloody but isolated skir- 
mishes, generation after generation. Settlement preceded 
governmental organization. 

In the Northwest, settlement did not begin until after 
the Revolution, and government preceded settlement. The 
first colonists found (1) territorial divisions Government 
marked off, and the form of government largely precedes 
determined ; {1) land surveys ready for the ^^^ ^^^^ 
farmer; and (3) some military protection. All this was 
arranged in advance by the national government. This 
child of the nation, therefore, never showed the tendencies 
to separatism which we have noted in the Southwest. 

Six States could make no claim to any part of the West, 
— Maryland, Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, New 
Hampshire, and Rhode Island ; and the title of 
South Carolina applied only to a strip of land claims to 
some twenty miles wide. But, as soon as the Western 
Revolution began, the other six States reasserted 
loudly old colonial claims to all the vast region between 
the mountains and the Mississippi. They planned to use 
these lands, too, in paying their soldiers and other war ex- 
penses, while the small States taxed themselves in hard 
cash for the war which was to win the territory from 
England. 

249 



250 THE OLD NORTHWEST 

North of the Ohio, too, the claims were conflicting. 
Virginia claimed all the Northwest, under her old charter, 
and she had done much to give real life to this weak title 
by taking steps toward actual possession — in Dunmore's 
War and in Clark's conquest of Illinois, and, from 1779 to 
1784, by governing the district from Vincennes to Kaskaskia 
as the County of Illinois. New York also claimed all the 
Northwest, but by the slightest of all titles. The middle 
The Mary- third of the North west was claimed also by both 
land doc- Massachusetts and Connecticut on the basis of 

trine : a , , . , 

common their aucicut charters. 

territory, to While opposing these "large State" claims, 
into new Maryland invented a new and glorious colonial 
states policy for America, and, standing alone through a 

stubborn four-year struggle, she forced the Union to adopt 
it. As early as November, 1776, a Maryland Convention 
set forth this resolution : — 

" That the back lands, claimed by the British crown, if secured 
by the blood and treasure of all, ought, in reason, justice, and 
policy, to be considered a common stock, to be parcelled out by 
Congress into free, convenient, and independent Governments, 
as the ivisdoni of that body shall hereafter direct." 

A year later, since Congress had failed to adopt this policy, 
Maryland made it a condition without which she would not 
ratify the Articles of Confederation, By February, 1779, 
every other State had ratified, but by the terms of the Arti- 
cles, that constitution could not become binding until ratified 
by each one of the thirteen States. Further 6,e\ay was in 
many ways perilous to the new Union ; and other States 
charged Maryland bitterly with lack of patriotism. Vir- 
ginia, in particular, insinuated repeatedly that the western 
lands were only an "ostensible cause" for her delay. With 
clear-eyed purj^ose, however, the little State held out, 
throwing the blame for delay where it belonged, — on 
Virginia and the other States claiming the West. At this 
time Thomas Paine performed one more great service to 
America. Though a citizen of Virginia, he published a 




The United States in 1783 — State Claims and Cessions 



STATE CESSIONS 251 

valiant plea for the Maryland plan — and lost his chance 
for a grant of lands, — all that stood between him and 
poverty. 

Public opinion gradually shifted to the support of the view 
so gallantly championed by Maryland ; and October 10, 1780, 
the Continental Congress formally pledged the Union 
to the new policy. A Congressional resolution sol- pledges 
emnly urged the States to cede the western lands ^^!*h *° 
to the central government, to be disposed of "for 
the common good of the United States." The resolution 
guaranteed also that all lands so ceded would be "formed 
into separate republican States, which shall become mem- 
bers of the federal union and have the same rights of free- 
dom, sovereignty, and independence as the other States." 

This completed the American plan of colonization. Pre- 
viously, the world had known only two plans : Greek and 
Phoenician colonies became free by separating at once from 
the mother cities ; the seventeenth and eighteenth century 
colonies of European countries had remained united to the 
mother countries, but in a condition of humiliating de- 
pendence. For the United States Maryland had devised a 
new plan combining permanent nnion with freedom. This 
great political invention was peculiarly adapted to a federal 
union, such as America was then forming. 

New York had already promised to give up her western 
claims, and now Connecticut promised to do likewise. In 
January, 1781, Virginia's promise followed, for state 
the lands north of the Ohio. The formal deeds of sessions 
cession were delayed by long negotiations over precise 
terms, but the general result was now certain. Maryland 
had won. Accordingly (March 1, 1781), she ratified the 
Articles. That constitution at last went into operation, — 
and the new confederacy possessed a "national domain." 

Kentucky remained part of Virginia until admitted into the 
Union as a State in 1792 ; and Virginia did not actually cede the 
Northwest until 1784, — retaining then the "Military Reserve" 



252 THE OLD NORTHWEST 

(a triangular tract of several million acres just north of the 
Ohio) wherewith to pay her soldiers. Connecticut completed her 
cession in 1785, and Massachusetts made hers in 1786. Connec- 
ticut retained 3,250,000 acres south of Lake Erie, as a basis for a 
public school fund. This district was soon settled largely by New 
Englanders, and was long known as "The Western Reserve"; 
but in 1800, when Connecticut had sold her property in the lands, 
she granted jurisdiction over the settlers to the United States. 
North Carolina ceded Tennessee in 1790, and South Carolina had 
given up her little tract three years earlier; but Georgia clung 
to her claims until 1802. 

It was now up to Congress to make good its promise in the 
resolution of October, 1780. Accordingly, when Thomas 
The Ordi- Jcfferson, as a Virginia delegate in Congress, pre- 
nance of sented to that body Virginia's final cession, he 

also proposed a plan of government for all terri- 
tory "ceded or to be ceded." This plan was soon en- 
acted into law and is commonly known as the Ordinance 
of 1784. 

Jefferson supposed that the States would complete their 
cessions promptly. Accordingly, the Ordinance of 1784 cut 
up all the western territory into fourteen proposed States, — 
Michigania, Mctropotamia, Polypotamia, Assenisipia, and 
so on. As in all our later organization of Territories, 
certain provisions were to be made a 7natter of compact 
between each new State and the United States ; and a 
remarkable attempt was made to exclude slavery from all 

the Western territory after the year 1800. This 
tempt to provision, however, received the votes of only six 
exclude States, and so failed of adoption. Virginia (in 

spite of Jefferson) and South Carolina voted No ; 
North Carolina was "divided" and so not counted; New 
Jersey, Delaware, and Georgia were absent. Jefferson 
stated later that, but for the sickness of a" delegate from 
New Jersey, that State would have been present and in the 
affirmative; so that the proposition "failed for want of 
one vote." 

In 1787 the Ordinance of 1784 was replaced by the great 



THE ORDINANCE OF 1787 253 

Northwest Ordinance. During the three years which had 
passed since the adoption of the first ordinance, there had 
been no district in the ceded territory populous enough to 
organize under the law. Meantime, some parts of the East 
had begun to look jealously at the prospect of so many new 
States, to outvote the Atlantic section in Congress. Con- 
gress, therefore, appointed a committee to prepare a new 
plan of organization, with view particularly to reducing 
the number of future States. 

There was also another thread to the story. In 1786 
a number of New England Revolutionary soldiers had 
organized a "companv of associates," to establish ,, 
themselves in new homes on the Ohio. Early in cutier and 
1787 this Ohio Company sent the shrewd Manasseh *J^^ ^^° 
Cutler (one of their directors) to buy a large 
tract of western land from Congress. Cutler found the 
proposed Territorial ordinance under discussion. Negotia- 
tions for the land deal and for the new Territorial law 
(under which the settlers would have to place themselves) 
became intermingled. Cutler proved an adroit lobbyist. 
On one occasion he had to frighten the hesitating Congress 
into action by pretending to take leave ; but finally both 
measures were passed. The Ordinance, with a number of 
new provisions satisfactory to the New Englanders, be- 
came law on July 13. A few days later the land sale was 
completed. 

The Ohio Company bought for itself 1,500,000 acres, at 
"two-thirds of a dollar an acre." Payment was accepted, 
however, in depreciated "certificates" with which Congress 
had paid the Revolutionary soldiers, so that the real cost 
was only eight or nine cents. Unhappily, the purchase 
was carried through by connecting it with a "job." In- 
fluential members of Congress, as the price of their support, 
induced Cutler to take, at this rate, not merely the million 
and a half acres which he wanted, but also three and a half 
million more, which were afterward privately transferred 
to another "company" composed of these congressmen 
and their friends. 



254 THE OLD NORTHWEST 

This taint of graft, of course, had nothing to do with the 
ordinance for organizing the territory. The "Northwest 
The " char- Ordinance" (so-called because, unlike its prede- 
ter " of the cessor, it applied only to the territory north of the 
ony " of the O^io) has been styled second in importance only 
United to the Declaration of Independence and the Con- 

***^^ stitution. Under it, the new type of American 

"colony" ("territory") was first actually established. Not 
less than three, nor more than five states were to be formed 
from the region, but, until further Congressional action, the 
whole district was to be one unit. Until the district should 
contain five thousand free male inhabitants, there was no self- 
government. Congress^ appointed a "governor" and three 
"judges." The governor created and filled all local offices; 
and governor and judges together selected laws suitable 
for Territorial needs from the codes of older States, — 
subject, however, to the veto of Congress. When the 
population had risen to the specified point, there was to 
be a two-House legislature, — a House of Representatives 
elected by the people, and a Legislative Council of five men 
selected by Congress from ten nominated by the Territorial 
lower House. This legislature was to send a Territorial dele- 
gate to Congress, with right to debate but not to vote. The 
governor, still appointed by Congress, had an absolute veto 
upon all acts of the legislature and controlled its sittings, 
calling and dissolving sessions at will. Thus, in this stage, 
the inhabitants had about the same amount of self-govern- 
ment as in a royal province before the Revolution. But 
the characteristic American idea appeared in the following 
words: "Whenever any of the said States shall have 
sixty thousand free inhabitants, such State shall be ad- 
mitted, by its delegates, into the Congress of the United 
States, on an equal footing with the original States in all 
respects whatever, and shall be at liberty to form a per- 
manent constitution and State government." 

^ This law was passed, of course, by the Continental Congress. After the 
adoption of the Constitution, the next year, many powers here given to Congress 
were transferred to the President of the United States. 



PROVISION FOR EDUCATION ^55 

Then followed six articles, "for extending the fundamental 
principles of civil and religious liberty . . . [and] to . . . 
establish those principles as the basis of all . . . its " bin 
governments which forever hereafter shall be °^ "shts " 
formed in the said territory." These articles were declared 
to be "articles of compact between the original States and 
the people ... in the said Territory . . . forever [to] re- 
main unalterable, unless by common consent.^' To similar 
provisions in the previous ordinance this noble "bill of 
rights" now added freedom of religion, habeas corpus 
privileges, exemption from cruel or unusual punishments, 
and jury trial. The Third Article declared that "schools 
and the means of education shall forever be encouraged"; 
and the great Sixth Article prohibited slavery, with a pro- 
vision, however, for the return of fugitive slaves escaping 
into the Northwest from other States. 

The Northwest Ordinance did not make specific provision 
for public support of education. That was done by two 
other ordinances which made smooth the way for western 
settlement and profoundly influenced its character, 

1. In 1785 Congress had passed an ordinance (originat- 
ing with Jefferson) (1) providing for a rectangular land 
survey by the government, in advance of settle- 
ment, and establishing land offices for sale of pub- land survey 
lie lands at low prices and in small lots ; and (2) °\^}^IT^ 
giving one thirty-sixth of the national domain 
(section 16 in each township) to the neu) States, for the sup- 
port of public schools. An attempt to set aside ^^^^ p^g. 
section 15 of each township for the support of re- vision for 
ligion was voted down ; but these other prin- ^^ °° ^ 
ciples remained fundamental in Western development. 

The intention was to have each township use the proceeds from 
its section 16 for its own schools. Happily, it was soon decided 
to give the sale of school lands to State officials, rather than to 
local officers, and to turn all proceeds into a permanent State fund, 
of which only the interest is divided each year among various 
localities of the State, usually in proportion to their school attend- 



^56 



THE OLD NORTHWEST 



ance. The States admitted since 1842 have received also section 
36 of each township for school purposes, or one eighteenth of the 
land within their limits, besides lavish grants for internal improve- 
ments. 

The rectangular survey made it possible for a pioneer to locate 
land without the costly aid of a private survey. Previous to this 
law of 1785, surveys had been irregular, overlapping in some places, 
and in others leaving large fractions unincorporated in any 
"description." The points of beginning, too, had been arbitrarily 

chosen, and, if once lost, they 
were hard to determine again. 
At almost the date of this ordi- 
nance, the records of Jefferson 
County in Kentucky describe 
the land of Abraham Lincoln's 
grandfather as located on a 
fork of the Long Run, begin- 
ning about two miles up from 
the mouth of the fork, "at a 
Sugar Tree standing in the side 
of the same marked S D B and 
extending thence East 300 
poles to a Poplar and Sugar 
Tree North 213i poles to a 
Beech and Dogwood West 300 
poles to a White Oak and Hick- 
ory South 213^ poles to the 
Beginning." The older por- 
tions of the country still keep 
these cumbersome and imper- 
fect descriptions. 




Manasseh Cutler, "Father" of State 
Universities, from a woodcut in an 
article on early Ohio in Harper's Maga- 
zine, September, 1885. 



2. The other great act of the dying Continental Congress 
which deserves grateful remembrance was passed a few days 
„ . , after the Northwest Ordinance. Cutler was not 

National • i i i i i 

land grants coiitcnt even With the generous terms he had 
for state secured for the Ohio Company ; and he obtained 

uiuvcrsiti6s 

a further free grant of forty-six thousand acres 
*'of good land" in the proposed Territory "for the support 
of an institution of higher learning," — the land to be lo- 
cated, and funds used, "as the future legislature of the 



SETTLEMENT AND ORGANIZATION 



257 



proposed settlement may direct." Here begins the policy 
of national land grants to "State universities." When the 
Territory of Indiana was set off on the West, a like grant 
was made for it ; and so on, for each new Territory since. 
After 1873, such grants to new Territories were doubled in 
amount — thanks to a curious persistence for a second grant 
by early Minnesota, which had largely wasted its first grant. 




An Ohio Mill, built soon after 1790. 



The Ohio Company eagerly pressed its preparations for 
settlement, and advertised the riches of the West extrava- 
gantly, to sell its lands; and in the winter of The second 
1787-1788, fifty New Englanders under General Mayflower 
Putnam made the western journey as far as Fort Pitt 
(Pittsburg). Here they built a huge boat, with sides pro- 
tected by bullet-proof bulwarks, naming it the Mayflower 
in memory of their forefathers' migration to a new world. 
As soon as the ice broke up, they floated down the Ohio to 
the mouth of the Muskingum, and there founded Marietta. 
Various hamlets soon clustered about this first settlement, 



258 THE OLD NORTHWEST 

— each, as a rule, centered about a mill, — and within two 
years the colony contained a thousand people. Thousands 
more floated past Marietta during its first season, most of 
them bound for Kentucky, but many to establish them- 
selves at points in the Northwest. 

For many years, migration continued to be by wagon to 
Pittsburg or Wheeling, and thence by water on hundred- 
Later settle- foot rafts carrying cattle and small houses, or on 
ment somcwhat more manageable flatboats seventy feet 

long perhaps. Such vehicles were steered from rocks and 
sand bars by long "sweeps." They floated lazily with the 
current by day, and tied up at the bank at night. Occasion- 
ally, long narrow keel boats were used ; and these were es- 
pecially convenient, because, by the brawny arms of seven 
or eight men, they could be poled up tributary streams, to 
choice points of settlement. For a time, settlement was 
hampered by frequent Indian forays. The wars that fol- 
lowed, however, were managed by the Federal government, 
with regiments of "regulars." In 1790 and 1791, expeditions 
against the Indians were repulsed disastrously — the second 
costing more than half the American force. But in 1794 
General Wayne inflicted a crushing defeat upon the natives ; 
and, the same year, a new treaty with England secured to 
the United States actual possession of the Northwest posts. 
This deprived the Indians of all hope of English support,^ 
and they ceased to molest settlement seriously until just 
before the War of 1812. 

The second stage of Territorial government, with a repre- 
sentative legislature, did not begin until 1799. The next 



1 American writers used to assume that the early Indian forays were directly 
fomented by the English officials in the Northwest posts. No doubt the pres- 
ence of English troops there did have some effect upon Indian hopes. But after 
a careful examination of recently opened sources of information. Professor Andrew 
McLaughlin writes: "I am glad to be able to state . . . that England and her 
ministers can be absolutely acquitted of the charge that they desired to foment 
war in the West. . . . There was never a time when the orders of the home govern- 
ment did not explicitly direct that war was to be deprecated, and that the Indians 
were to be encouraged to keep the peace." Report of American Historical Associ- 
ation for 1894, 435 ff. 




» BOUNDS OF SETTLED AREA IN 1774 
'FRONTIER LINE 1790 
-FRONTIER LINE 1820 



SETTLEMENT AND ORGANIZATION 259 

year Congress divided the district into two "Territories." 
In 1802 the eastern Territory was admitted to the Union 
as the State of Ohio. The western district became the Ter- 
ritory of Indiana. 

The early Western settlements, we have seen, reproduced" 
the simplicity of the first settlements on the Atlantic coast 
a century and a half before ; and the progress of The mean- 
the new communities was influenced greatly by ^^^ °/ *^^ 
the experience of the older ones. But the West- American 
ern societies did not merely copy Eastern de- ^"story 
velopment. They did not begin just where the Atlantic 
seaboard settlements did. They started on a different 
plane and with greater momentum. The Atlantic frontier 
had to work upon European germs. Moving westward, 
each new frontier was more and more American, at the 
start ; and soon the older communities were reacted upon 
wholesomely by the simplicity and democracy of the West. 
These considerations give the key to the meaning of 
the West in American history. Says Frederic J. Turner, 
the first interpreter of the West in our history : — 

"American social development has been continually beginning 
over again on the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of 
American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, 
this continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, 
furnish the forces dominating American character. . . . The 
frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization." 



PART V — THE CONSTITUTION AND THE FEDERALISTS 
CHAPTER XIV 

THE "LEAGUE OF FRIENDSHIP" 

The motion in Congress for Independence, on June 7, 
1776, contained also a resolution that a "plan of confedera- 
„, ... tion" be prepared and submitted to the States. A 

The Articles . 

ofConfeder- Committee was appointed at once to draw up a 
r"ifi d P^^^' Not till November, 1777, however, did 

Congress adopt the Articles of Confederation ; and 
ratification by the States was not secured until 1781 (page 
251), when the war was virtually over. From '76 to '81, 
Congress exercised the powers of a central government. 
The States had not expressly authorized it to do so, but they 
acquiesced, informally, because of the supreme necessity. 

During those years were the States one nation or thirteen? 
No one at the time thought the Declaration of Independence 
Character binding upon any State because of the action at 
?/ *^.® „ Philadelphia, but only because of the instructions 

union .„ . , in • IP /-^ 

from 1781 or ratmcatiou by the btate itseli. Congress 
to 1789 ]^a(^ ^qi even advised the States on Independ- 
ence. It waited for the States to instruct their delegates. 
Then the vote was taken by States, and the delegates of 
no State voted for the Declaration until authorized by 
their own State Assembly. The action at Philadelphia 
on July 4, 1776, amounted to a joint announcement, 
in order, in Franklin's phrase, that they might all "hang 
together," so as not to "hang separately." Twenty years 
afterward, in a decision of the Supreme Court of the United 
States, Justice Chase said: "I regard this [th^ Declaration 
of July 4, 1776] a declaration not that the united colonies 
in a collective capacity were independent States, but that 

260 



ONE PEOPLE OR THIRTEEN 261 

each of them was a sovereign and independent State'' (3 
Dallas, 224). 

The final paragraph of the Declaration refers to "the 
authority of the good people of these colonies"; and, in 
later times, that one phrase has been tortured TheDecia- 
into proof that the Declaration was the act of 1^^^°^ °^^ 

1 • 1 4.- a u • Independ- 

one people, — a single nation, bucn reasoning ence and 
ignores three longer phrases in the same para- *^® states 
graph which teach more emphatically the opposite doc- 
trine, — of thirteen peoples. The signed copy, too, was 
headed "The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen United 
States." 

It would be unwise, however, to draw conclusions from 
the wording of this document alone, even were that wording 
in agreement throughout. The men of '76 had not yet 
learned to use the terms, independence, sovereign, state, 
nation, with the nice precision that belongs to later days. 
Moreover, they were thinking just then of the relations 
of the States to England, not to one another. But other 
language — of even the most accurate thinkers and most 
earnest "unionists" — proves beyond doubt that men did 
not think of the thirteen States as one nation in 1776. 
Hamilton wrote, in 1784 : "By the Declaration of Independ- 
ence of July 4, 1776, acceded to by our Convention one people 
of the ninth, the late colony of New York became °^ thirteen 
an independent State"" {Works, Lodge ed.. Ill, 470). The 
Pennsylvania Convention in July, 1776, approved the "co- 
gent reasons" given "by the honorable Continental Congress 
for declaring this, as well as the other United States of Amer- 
ica free and independent," and asserted that "we will . . . 
maintain the freedom and independency of this and the other 
United States." So, too, Connecticut (October, 1776), 
when adopting her old charter for a constitution, de- 
clared, "This Republic [viz., Connecticut] is ... a free, 
sovereign, and independent State." In all these early 
statements, the word United in " United States " is merely 
an adjective. 

More than half a century later there dawned a long 



262 THE CRITICAL PERIOD, 1783-1788 

struggle — finally to be settled by the sword — between 
Union and Disunion. Meantime the early principle of 
Union had been growing stronger and more pervasive, until 
it had become the truth most essential to the political life 
of our people. The progressive side in the long conflict 
took its stand upon this truth; and, with a common in- 
stinct of our people, they tried to date that truth back 
further than it really belonged, so as to claim for it the 
sanction of age — as reformers of the English-speaking 
race have ever tried to persuade themselves that they were 
only trying to get back to the " good old days of King 
Edward." The splendid names of Story and Lincoln became 
connected with the mistaken doctrine that the Union was 
older than the States. To the North, this blunder finally 
became identified with patriotism ; and for two generations 
after the Civil War it was taught in textbooks. 

The present generation has not known the terrible danger 
of disunion, and can look more calmly at the theories. We 
can all see now that the real basis for Lincoln's stand was 
not any theory about the past, but the need and will of 
a living people. Still we must not assert dogmatically that, 
the States were older than the Union — and leave the 
delicate question so. W^hen we look at the actions of the 
time as well as at its words, we see that States and Union 
grew up together. True, the States took form fastest and 
first : but, from the beginning, there was a general expec- 
tation that they would soon be united. Except for some 
such expectation, they would hardly have been born at all : 
and except for the creation of a union, they certainly could 
not have lived. The Union did not create the States; 
but it did preserve them. 

Just after July 4, 1776, there was nothing but common 
sense to keep any State from acting as an independent 
nation. Some of them did act so, even in foreign relations. 
Virginia negotiated with Spain about the protection of their 
common trading interests in the West ; and she even thought 
it necessary for her legislature to confirm the treaty made by 
Congress with France in 1778. But, on the whole, with 



CONGRESS AND THE STATES 263 

great good sense, the States allowed their 'possible independence 
to lapse by disuse. As a rule, Congress managed the war 
and all foreign relations ; and this practice was soon made 
the constitutional theory by the ratification of the Articles of 
Confederation. 

The years 1783-1788 were " The Critical Period." When 
the umr for Independence closed, it became plain that the real 
dangers to American union were three: the weakness of the 
Central Government, conflicts between the States, and anarchy 
within individual States. 

The authority of Congress was really less after 1781 than be- 
fore. The war was practically over, and the States no longer 
felt it necessary to obey a central power. More weaknesses 
and more, the wish for nationality was lost in a °^ Congress 
narrow State patriotism. In the generous glow of the first 
years of revolution, Patrick Henry had once exclaimed: "I 
am no longer a Virginian : I am an American." But about 
1781 the language of State sovereignty became almost uni- 
versal. Henry would now have been loath to call himself 
" an American first" ; and in the Virginia Assembly, Richard 
Henry Lee spoke of Congress as "a foreign power." The 
weakness of that gathering became notorious and shameful. 
Able and ambitious men left it for places in State legislatures. 
In 1785 and 1786, for more than half its sessions, not enough 
members to do business could be got together. The treaty 
of' 1783 had to be ratified within six months of its signing at 
Paris ; but three months expired before the necessary nine 
States were represented in Congress. Twenty delegates, rep- 
resenting only seven States, were present when Washington 
resigned command of the army. Rarely afterward were 
eleven States represented ; and often three men (of the 
twenty or twenty-five present) could defeat any important 
measure, — since such measures required the assent of nine 
States. Two weaknesses of Congress call for special atten- 
tion. It could not negotiate with foreign powers to advan- 
tage ; and it could not raise funds for the bare necessities 
of government at home. 



264 THE CRITICAL PERIOD, 1783-1788 

1. Congress had proven unable to compel the States to 
respect even the treaty of peace with England (page 235). 
We wished a further commercial treaty, but the irritated 
English ministry asked whether they were to deal with 
one state or with thirteen. Other countries, too, cared 
little to spend effort on negotiations that promised to be 
waste paper. 

2. Congress was bankrupt. For a time it paid interest on 
the $6,000,000 it had borrowed from France, but only by 

borrowing $2,000,000 more from Holland ; and 
there came a period when it was impossible for 
Yankee ingenuity to wheedle more money from friendly 
Frenchman or Dutchman. At home. Congress had made no 
pretense of paying even interest. Interest-bearing "certifi- 
cates," issued by Congress to pay off the army, passed by 
1788 at twelve cents on the dollar, and the $240,000,000 of 
paper currency was practically repudiated. Congress could 
get money only by calling upon the States for contributions. 
In 1781, while the war was still going on. Congress called 
for $5,000,000. Less than a tenth was paid. Some States 
ignored the call, and New Jersey defied it. During the 
six years 1783-1788 (after the war), Congress made requi- 
sitions amounting to $6,000,000 ; but less than $1,000,000 
was ever paid. 

This shame cannot be excused on any plea of poverty. The 
war had demoralized industry ; but after all, the main 
difficulty was the desire of each State to shift its burden 
upon a neighbor. Says Francis A. Walker {Making of the 
Nation, 9) : "Our fathers at the close of the Revolution 
were not an impoverished people. They were able to give 
all that was demanded of them. It chiefly was a bad 
political mechanism which set every man and every State 
to evading obligations. . . . Under a thoroughly false 
system, such as this was, it is amazing how much meanness 
and selfishness will come out." This judgment is proved 
correct by the fact that with a change of political ma- 
chinery these evils vanished. 



INTERNAL STRIFE AND ANARCHY 265 

The second great evil of the period was strife between the 
States. A wise provision of the Articles tried to make Con- 
gress the arbiter in disputes between States ; but g^^j^^ ^^_ 
bitter jealousies made this provision a dead letter, tween the 
Each State had its line of custom houses against *^*^^ 
all the others, with all sorts of discriminations, fruitful of 
discord. Connecticut taxed goods from Massachusetts more 
than the same articles from England, — in hope of drawing 
away British trade from the older colony ; and, on another 
frontier, she waged a small war with Pennsylvania over the 
ownership of the Wyoming valley, while she seemed on the 
verge of war, for similar reasons, with New York and New 
Hampshire. New York taxed ruinously the garden produce 
of the New Jersey farmers, who supplied her and who had 
no other market ; and New Jersey retaliated with a con- 
fiscatory tax of a thousand dollars upon a spot of sandy 
coast which New York had bought from her for the site 
of a lighthouse. South Carolina and Georgia were coming 
to blows over the navigation of the Savannah. Kentucky, 
Tennessee, Vermont, and Maine were all demanding in- 
dependence of the older States of which they were still 
legally a part. In all ages the two fruitful causes of war 
between neighboring nations have been disputes over trade 
and over boundaries ; and just such disputes were now 
threatening to turn the Atlantic coast into a stage for 
petty bloody wars. 

The third great evil was anarchy inside the States. The 
long struggle against England's control led some intelligent 
patriots, like Samuel Adams and Richard Henry Anarchy in 
Lee, to object to any real control over the new individual 
States, even by Congress ; and it made many 
ignorant men hostile to any government. Central or State. 
For years, even before open war, they had associated service 
to liberty with anti-social acts — boycotts, breaking up 
courts, terrorizing officers of the law. Many of them had 
won easy reputation as patriots by refusing to pay honest 
debts due in England; and they now felt it a hardship to 



266 THE CRITICAL PERIOD, 1783-1788 

pay debts to their neighbors. Demagogues declaimed, to 
applauding crowds, that all debts ought to be wiped out. 
Wild theories as to common ownership of property were in 
the air. 

A rude awakening all this proved to the patriots who had 
expected a golden age. "Good God!" exclaimed Washing- 
ton, of such disorders: "Who but a Tory could have fore- 
seen, or a Briton predicted, them.^" And again, in mo- 
mentary despair, he declared that such commotions 
"exhibit a melancholy proof . . . that mankind, when left 
to themselves, are unfit for their own government." The 
worst of it was, too, that these semi-criminal forces of 
lawlessness and confiscation were reinforced by the bitter 
discontent of midtitudes of well-meaning men who were 
suffering real hardships. Many an old soldier who had 
lost his home by mortgage foreclosure, or who was in danger 
of doing so, felt that the loss was due to his having received 
insufficient pay in worthless paper money, while the law 
of the time drained his slender resources by extortionate 
court fees, and threatened to condemn him to hopeless 
imprisonment for such undeserved debt. 

The most widespread manifestation of this wild spirit was 

the fiat money craze that swept over half the States and 

threatened all the others, despite the recent 

Fiat money . . -xi i t tvt 

grievous experience with such currency, in J\ew 
Hampshire an armed mob besieged the legislature to obtain 
such relief. The Rhode Island experience was the most seri- 
ous, but it also suggested a remedy. Paper money was the 
issue in that State in the election of the legislature in 1785. 
The "cheap money" party won. Creditors fled, to escape 
accepting the new "legal tender" for old loans of good 
money, and storekeepers closed their shops rather than 
sell goods for the worthless stuff. Then the legislature 
made it a penal offense, punishable without jury trial, to refuse 
the paper in trade. Finally a certain W^eeden, a butcher, 
who had refused to sell meat for paper to one Trevett, 
was brought to trial (1786). Weeden's lawyer pleaded 
that the law, refusing jury trial, was in conflict with the 



SHAYS' REBELLION 267 

"constitution" ^ and was therefore void. The court took 
this view and dismissed the case. The legislature summoned 
the judges to defend themselves ; and, after hearing their 
defense, voted that it was unsatisfactory. At the next 
election, three of the four judges were defeated ; but their 
action had helped to lay the foundation for the tremendous 
power of the later American courts. 

Most important of all the anarchic movements was Shays' 
Rebellion in Massachusetts. For six months in 1786-1787, 
parts of the State were in armed insurrection shays' 
against the regular State government. Rioters Rebellion 
broke up the courts in three large districts, to stop proceed- 
ings against debtors. Aijd Daniel Shays, a Revolutionary 
captain, with nearly two thousand men, was barely repulsed 
from the Federal arsenal at Springfield. Says Francis A. 
Walker: "The insurgents were largely, at least in the first 
instance, sober, decent, industrious men, wrought to madness 
by what they deemed their wrongs ; but they were, of course, 
joined by the idle, the dissipated, the discontented, the 
destructive classes, as the insurrection grew." 

Congress prepared to raise troops to aid Massachusetts, 
but, fearing to avoir that purpose, pretended to be preparing 
for an Indian outbreak. In any case. Congress was too 
slow to help. The legislature of Massachusetts, too, 
proved timid. But Governor Bowdoin acted with decision. 
The State militia were called out (supported by contribu- 
tions from Boston capitalists), and the rebels were dispersed 
in a sharp midwinter campaign. A few months later, 
however, Bowdoin was defeated for reelection by John 
Hancock, a sympathizer with the rebellion, — who then 
pardoned Shays and other rebel leaders. 

This rebellion was one of the chief events leading to the 
new Federal Constitution. Men could look calmly at 
Rhode Island vagaries, and even at New Hampshire an- 
archy; but riot and rebellion in the staid, powerful Bay 

1 "Constitution" was used here, as by Otis in 1761, in the English sense, since 
the Rhode Island charter made no specific reference to trial by jury. This makes 
the decision the more daring and remarkable. 



THE CRITICAL PERIOD, 1783-1788 

State was another matter. It seemed to prophesy the 
dissolution of society, unless there could be formed at once 
a central government strong enough "to ensure domestic 
tranquillity." When Henry Lee in Congress spoke of using 
influence to abate the rebellion, Washington wrote him in 
sharp rebuke, "You talk, my good Sir, of using influence. 
. . . Influence is no government. Let us have one [a 
government] by which our lives, liberties, and properties 
may be secured, or let us know the worst." 

All these evils of the Critical Period had their roots in the 
Articles of Confederation. The Confederation called itself 
Weaknesses ^ "fii'm league of friendship." Avowedly it fell 
of the far short of a national union. The central 

^^^^ ^^ authority was vested in a Congress of delegates. 
These delegates were appointed annually by the State 
legislatures, and were paid by them. Each State had one 
vote in Congress, and nine States had to agree for im- 
portant measures. Each State promised to the citizens 
of the other States all the privileges enjoyed by its own 
citizens (the greatest step toward real unity in the Arti- 
cles) ; and the States were forbidden to enter into any 
treaty with foreign powers or witli each other, or to 
make laws or impose tariffs that should conflict with any 
treaty made by Congress. Congress was to have sole 
control over all foreign relations ; and, for internal matters, 
it was to manage the postal service and regulate weights 
and measures and the coinage. The final article read : 
"Every State shall abide by the determination of the United 
States, in Congress assembled, on all questions which by 
this Confederation are submitted to them. And the 
Articles of this Confederation shall be inviolably observed by 
every State, and the Union shall be perpetual. . . ." But 
a previous article provided, "Each State retains its sov- 
ereigfity, freedom, and independence, and every power, 
jurisdiction, and right which is not by this Confederation 
expressly delegated to the United States in Congress assem- 
bled." 

The "Articles of Confederation" was not a crude or 



THE ARTICLES OF CONFEDERATION 269 

clumsy document of its kind. Probably it was the best 
constitution for a confederacy of states that the world had 
ever seen. Certainly it had many improvements over the 
ancient CTreek confederations and over the Swiss and Dutch 
unions. The real trouble was, no mere confederacy could 
answer the needs of the new American people. That people 
needed a national government. 

The four great weaknesses of the Articles had proved to 
be : poor machinery of government, an insufficient enu- 
meration of powers, the impossibility of amendment, and 
the fact that the government could not act upon individual 
citizens, but only upon States. 

1. The requirement that nine States in Congress must 
agree for important business hindered action unduly, — 
especially when for long periods not more than p^^^. ^^_ 
nine or ten States were represented. Moreover cWnery of 
the union had no executive and only a feeble 2°^®'^"™^'^* 
germ of a judiciary. 

2. No federal government had ever had a longer list of 
important matters committed to its control, but the list 
should have contained at least two more powers : 

power to regulate interstate commerce would have powers 
prevented much civil strife ; and authority to enumer- 
levy a loic tariff for revenue would have done 
away with the chief financial difficulties. 

3. After all, the first two defects were matters of detail. 
They might have been remedied without giving up the 
fundamental principle of the union as a league of impossi- 
sovereign States. And the States would have cor- biiity of 
rected them, in part at least, had it not been for ^"^^"d'"^"* 
the third evil. The amending clause (in the Thirteenth 
Article) demanded the unanimous consent of the thiiieen 
State legislatures for any change in the Articles. In prac- 
tice, this prevented any amendment. 

In February, 1781, Congress submitted to the States an amend- 
ment which would have added to its powers the authority to put a 



270 THE CRITICAL PERIOD, 1783-1788 

Jive per cent iariff on imports, — the proceeds to be used in paying 
the national debt and the interest upon it. This modest request for 
an absolutely indispensable power roused intense opposition. 
"If taxes can thus be levied by any power outside the States," 
cried misguided patriots, "why did we oppose the tea duties?" 
After a year's discussion, twelve States consented ; but Rhode 
Island voted that such authority in Congress would "endanger the 
liberties of the States," and the amendment failed. 

Another attempt was made at once (1783), similar to the former 
except that now the authority was to be granted Congress for 
only twenty-five years. Four States voted No, Virginia among 
them ; and said Richard Henry Lee, " If such an amendment 
prevail. Liberty will become an empty name." Congress made 
these States a solemn appeal not to ruin the only means of redeem- 
ing the sacred faith of the Union. Three of them yielded, but New 
York (jealous now of her rapidly growing commerce) maintained 
her refusal; and the amendment again failed (1786), after three 
years of negotiation. Far-seeing men then gave up hope of efficient 
amendment by constitutional means. Revolution (peaceable or 
violent) or anarchy, — these were the alternatives. 

4. The fourth evil (the failure to act upon individuals) was 
fundamental. It could not be corrected except by changing 

the confederation of sovereign States into some 
ment by kind of national union. For three millions of 
suppiica- weak subjects Congress might have passed laws. 

On thirteen powerful subjects it could merely 
make requisitions. John Smith or Henry Jones would 
hardly think of refusing obedience to a command from a 
Central government ; but New York or Virginia felt as 
strong as Congress itself, and would do as they pleased. 
A confederation of states is necessarily a "government by 
supplication." 

In the final outcome it ivas fortunate that constitutional 
amendment was impossible. Otherwise, reasonable amend- 
Recognition ment might have patched up the Articles and 
of the evils kept the defective union alive. But no ordinary 
amendment could have cured the fundamental evil. The 
Constitutional Convention of 1787, when it came, perceived 



THE ARTICLES OF CONFEDERATION 271 

the need clearly and met it courageously. For several years, 
from 1781 to 1787, thinkers had been groping towards the 
idea that we must have a new kind of federation, such that 
the central government could act directly upon individual 
citizens ; and in that final year Hamilton wrote : — 

"The evils we experience do not proceed from minute or partial 
imperfections, but from fundamental errors in the structure, which 
cannot be amended otherwise than by an alteration in the first 
principles and main pillars of the fabric. The great radical vice 
of the existing confederacy is the principle of Legislation for 
States in their corporate or collective capacity, as contradis- 
tinguished from the Individuals of which they consist." — 
Federalist, XI. (The variety of type was used by Hamilton.) 

This fundamental defect had been found in every federal 
union in earlier history. All had been confederations of 
states. The American Constitution of 1787 was a federal 
to give to the world a new type of government, ^***® °^ * 
— a federal state. In the old type the states tion of 
remained sovereign states confederated. In the states 
new type they are fused, for certain purposes, into one 
sovereign unit. This new kind of federal government, said 
the shrewd and philosophical Tocqueville forty years later, 
was "a great discovery in political science." It was 
adopted by Switzerland in 1848, by the Dominion of 
Canada in 1867, by the German Empire in 1871, by 
Australia in 1900, and by South Africa in 1909. 



CHAPTER XV 

THE FEDERAL CONVENTION AND THE CONSTITUTION 

When the second revenue amendment failed, in 1786 
(page 270), a "Continental convention" had already been 
called to consider more radical changes. 

Suggestions . .- . n . 

for change Suggestions jor a convention to jorni a stronger 

in govern- government had been made from time to time by 
individuals for several years. As early as 1776 
Thomas Paine had urged : — 

"Nothing but a continental form of government can keep the 
peace of the continent. . . . Let a continental conference be held 
to frame a continental charter. . . . Our strength and happiness 
are continental, not provincial. We have every opportunity and 
every encouragement to form the noblest and purest constitution 
on the face of the earth." 

Twice Hamilton had secured from the New York legislature 
a resolution favoring such a convention. No concrete 
result followed, however, until these proposals became 
connected with a commercial undertaking. 

Washington had long been interested in Western lands, 
and at the close of the Revolution he owned some thirty 
.T.^ „ thousand acres in the Virginia Military Reserve 

The Mount , _,^^, * • • i itt • i i • 

Vernon (pagc 251). A visit to the VVcst mipressed hnn 

1786*'°^' powerfully with the need of better communica- 
tion with that region, both for business pros- 
perity and for continued political union ; ^ and he urged 
Virginia to build roads to her Western possessions. In 
pursuance of this idea he became president of a company 

^ Referring to the danger that the Westerners might join Spain, he wrote : 
"They . . . stand, as it were, upon a pivot. The touch of a feather would turn 
them either way." 

272 



PRELIMINARY ATTEMPTS 273 

to improve the navigation of the Potomac. This matter 
required assent from both Virginia and Maryland. These 
States were also in dispute over the tariffs at the mouth 
of Chesapeake Bay. At Washington's invitation, commis- 
sioners from the two States met at Mount Vernon, to discuss 
these matters. There it was decided to hold another meet- 
ing to which Pennsylvania also should be invited, as she, 
too, was interested in Chesapeake Bay. Washington 
had suggested that the proposed meeting, since it concerned 
improvement in the means of commerce, should consider also 
the possibility of uniform duties on that commerce. Mary- 
land expressed approval, and asked whether it might not be 
well to invite other States to the proposed conference ; and 
Virginia finally issued an invitation to all the States to send 
representatives to Annapolis, September 1, 1786. 

Only five States appeared at this Annapolis Convention. 
Even Maryland failed to choose delegates. ,But New 
Jersey had instructed her representatives to try 
to secure, not only uniform duties, but also other of the 
measures which might render the Confederation ade- Annapolis 
quale to the needs of the times. This thought was 
made the basis of a new call. The delegates at Annapolis 
adopted an address, drawn by Alexander Hamilton, urging 
all the States to send commissioners to Philadelphia the 
following May, — 

"to devise such further provisions as shall appear to them necessary 
to render the constitution of the federal government adequate 
to the exigencies of the Union," and to report to Congress such 
an act "as when agreed to by them [Congress], and confirmed by 
the legislatures of every State, will effectually provide for " those 
exigencies. 

At first this call attracted little attention. But the 
sudden increase of anarchy in the fall of 1786 brought men 
to recognize the need for immediate action. Here was the 
opportunity. Madison persuaded the Virginia legislature 
to appoint delegates and to head the list with the name 
of Washington. Even in Virginia there had been warm 



274 THE PHILADELPHIA CONVENTION, 1787 

opposition to a convention. Patrick Henry refused to 
attend, and the young Monroe called the meeting unwise. 
Washington thought of declining his appointment, not 
because the meeting was not needed, but because he ex- 
pected it to turn out a fizzle and questioned whether at- 
tendance would be consonant with his dignity. Not until 
late in March did he agree to go, after three months of 
hesitation. Meantime other States had followed Virginia's 
lead, and the Philadelphia Convention became a fact. 

That famous Convention lasted four months — from 
May 25, 1787, to September 17. The debates were guarded 
ThePhiia- ^^^ ^^^^ most solcmu pledges of secrecy. Most 
deiphia that we know about them comes from Madison's 

May^to*"'" notes. Madison had been disappointed in the 
September, meager information regarding the establishment 
^^^^ of earlier confederacies, and he believed that 

upon the success of the federation now to be formed "would 
be staked . . . possibly the cause of liberty throughout 
the world." Accordingly, he determined to preserve full 
records of its genesis. Missing no session, he kept careful 
notes of each day's proceedings and of each speaker's 
arguments ; and each evening he wrote up these notes more 
fully, submitting them sometimes to the speakers for cor- 
rection. In 1837, when every member of the Convention 
had passed away, Congress bought this manuscript from 
Madison's Mrs. Madisou, and published it as "Madison's 
Journal Journal of the Constitutional Conventions^ A few 
other members took imperfect notes and several wrote 
letters that throw light upon the attitude of certain men. 

Fifty-five men sat in the Convention. Seventy-three 
delegates were appointed, but eighteen failed to appear. 
Composition Twenty-nine of the fifty-five had benefited by 
and leaders college life ; but among those who had missed that 
training were Franklin and Washington. With few excep- 
tions the members were young men, several of the most 
active being under thirty. The entire body was English 
by descent and traditions. Three notable members — 
Alexander Hamilton of New York, and James Wilson and 



THE MEN 



275 



Robert Morris of Pennsylvania — had been born English 
subjects outside the United States ; and the great South 
Carolina delegates, Rutledge and the Pinckneys, had been 
educated in England. 

Virginia and New Jersey were to give their names to the 
two schemes that contended for mastery in the Convention ; 
and their delegations, 
therefore, are of special 
interest. Virginia sent 
seven members. Among 
them were Washing- 
ton , George Mason (who 
eleven years before had 
drawn the first State 
constitution), Edmund 
Randolph, her brilliant 
young governor, and 
Madison, who was to 
earn the title "Father 
of the Constitution." 
New Jersey sent four 
delegates, all tried 
statesmen : Livingstone, 
eleven times her gov- 
ernor, Patterson, ten 
times her Attorney- 
General, Br early, her 
great Chief Justice, and 
Houston, many times her 
Congressman. These 
delegations were typi- 
cal. "Hardly a man in the Convention," says McMaster, 
"but had sat in some famous assembly, had filled some 
high place, or had made himself conspicuous for learn- 
ing, for scholarship, or for signal service rendered in the 
cause of liberty." 

On the other hand, William Pierce of Georgia, who sat in 
the Convention, in his entertaining character sketches of his 




George Washington. From the Stuart por- 
trait. Washington was president of the 
Convention and exercised great influence 
there, though he made no formal speech in 
its sessions. He was to live thirteen years 
after that meeting. This most famous of 
his portraits belongs to the later period of 
his life. Says John Fiske, very happily, 
Washington was a typical English gentle- 
man, reared on the right side of the Atlantic. 



276 THE PHILADELPHIA CONVENTION, 1787 

associates there, has nothing to say of several except that 
they were gentlemen " of Family and fortune." Certainly 
Fear of this Ulustrious company felt a deep distrust of de- 
democracy mocracy. In their political thought, they were 
much closer to John Winthrop than to Abraham Lincoln. 
They wished a government for the people, but hy what they 
were fond of calling "the wealth and intelligence of the 
country." At best, they were willing only so far to divide 
power between "the few" and "the many" as to keep each 
class from oppressing the other, — and they felt particular 
tenderness for "the few." The same causes that made them 
desire a stronger government made them wish also a more 
aristocratic government. It seemed an axiom to them that 
the unhappy conditions of their country were due (as Gerry ^ 
phrased it) to "an excess of democracy." 

Necessarily the men of the Convention belonged to the 
eighteenth century, not the twentieth. But, more than 
that, they represented the crest of a reactionary movement 
of their own day. In the early Revolutionary years, the 
leaders had been forced to throw themselves into the arms 
of democracy for protection against England (page 186), 
and those years had been marked by a burst of noble en- 
thusiasm for popular government. But, when the struggle 
was over, the "leaders of society" began to look coldly 
upon further partnership with distasteful allies no longer 
needed ; and this inevitable tendency was magnified by 
the unhappy turbulence of the times. By 1785, especially 
among the professional and commercial classes, a con- 
servative reaction had set in ; and this expressed itself 
emphatically in the Philadelphia Convention. Says Wood- 
row Wilson (Division and Reunion, 12): — "The Federal 
government was not by intention a democratic government. 
In plan and in structure it had been meant to check the sweep 
and power of popular majorities. . . . [It] had in fact been 
originated and organized upon the initiative, and primarily 
in the interest, of the mercantile and wealthy classes." 

' Elbridge Gerry was one of the four delegates from Massachusetts, perhaps 
the most democratic of them, and, some years later, a real democratic leader. 



DISTRUST OF DEMOCRACY 277 

May 31, the second day of debate, Gerry declared that he 
"abhorred" pure democracy as ''the worst of all political 
evils.''' ^ The same day, Roger Sherman of 
Connecticut objected to the popular election of Randolph, 
the members even of the lower House of Congress, ^^ 
because ''the people, immediately, should have as 
little to do as may he about the government''', and Ran- 
dolph explained that the Senate, in the Virginia plan, 
was designed as "a check against this tendency" [democ- 
racy]. In tracing to their origin the evils under which 
the country labored, "every man," he affirmed, "had found 
[that origin] in the turbulence and follies of democracy." 
Two days later, Dickinson declared "a limited monarchy 
. . . one of the best governments in the world. It was not 
certain that equal blessings were derivable from any other 
form. ... A limited monarchy, however, was out of the 
question. The spirit of the times forbade the experiment. . . . 
But though a form the most perfect perhaps in itself be un- 
attainable, we must not despair"-, and he proceeded to sug- 
gest ways to make property count in the new government. 
June 6, he returned to this theme, urging that the Senate 
should be "carried through such a refining process [viz., in- 
direct elections and property qualifications] as will assimi- 
late it, as nearly as may be, to the House of Lords in 
England." 

Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania, one of the most 
brilliant and effective men in the Convention, also believed 
it essential that the Senate should be "an aristo- Morris and 
cratic body," composed of rich men holding office Hamuton 
for life. Said he, "It must have great personal property; 
it must have the aristocratic spirit; it must love to lord 
it through pride." Morris, Rufus King of Massachusetts, 
and Rutledge strove strenuously to have wealth repre- 
sented in the lower House also, affirming, each of them, 
that "property is the main object of government"; nor 
did this claim, so un-American to our ears, call forth one 

' The quotations in this chapter come from Madison's Journal, unless otherwise 
indicated. 



278 



THE PHILADELPHIA CONVENTION, 1787 



protest that government should concern itself as much 
with human rights as with property rights. Hamilton 
held, perhaps, the most extreme ground against democ- 
racy. He "acknowledged himself not to think favorably 

of republican govern- 
ment. . . . He was sen- 
sible at the same time 
that it would be unwise 
[for the convention] to 
propose one of any other 
form. But in his pri- 
vate opinion, he had no 
scruple in declaring, 
supported as he was by 
the opinion of so many 
of the good and wise, 
that the British govern- 
ment was the best in the 
world, and he doubted 
much whether anything 
short of it would do in 
America.'^ It was "the 
model to which we 
should approach as 
nearly as possible." The 
House of Lords he styled 
"a most noble institu- 
tion," especially com- 
mending it as "a per- 
manent barrier against 
every pernicious innova- 
tion^ Hamilton then presented a detailed plan, which, he 
Hamilton's Said, represented his own views of what was de- 
" pi«i^ " sirable in America : an Executive for life, with 
extreme monarchic powers (including an absolute veto), chosen 
by indirect election; a Senate for life, chosen by indirect 
election; and a representative assembly chosen by free- 
holders; this government was to appoint the governors 




Benjamin Franklin. From the portrait by 
Duplessis during Franklin's residence in 
France. At the time of the Convention, 
Franklin was 82. William Pierce (.see page 
275) calls him "the greatest phylosopher of 
the age ; the very heavens obey him, and 
the clouds yield up their lightning to be im- 
prisoned in his rod. But ... he is no 
speaker, nor does he seem to let politics engage 
his attention. He . . . tells a story in a style 
more engaging than anything I ever heard." 



CONFLICTING INTERESTS 279 

of the States, and, through them, to exercise an absolute 
veto upon all State legislation. 

Such statements went almost unchallenged. Dissent, if 
expressed at all, cloaked itself in apologetic phrase. This 
was due to the unfortunate absence of a group ., 
of splendid figures whom we might have expected the demo- 
to see in that gathering. Great as the Virginia ^^^^^^ 
delegation was, it might have been greater 
still, had it included Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, 
Richard Henry Lee, or Thomas Paine ; and it would 
no doubt have been well had Massachusetts sent Samuel 
Adams, or New York her great war-governor, George 
Clinton. Four or five of these democratic leaders would 
have given a different tone to the debates. As things were, 
every prominent patriot of Revolutionary fame, on the 
conservative side, was present, except John Adams and 
John Jay ; but the lonely representatives of democracy 
were George Mason and the aged and gentle Franklin — 
just returned from many years of residence at the aristo- 
cratic French court. And even Mason "admitted that we 
had been too democratic," though he was fearful the Con- 
vention was going to the other extreme. 

The Convention had many conflicting interests. It con- 
tained Nationalists and State-sovereignty men, "North- 
erners" and "Southerners," commercial interests "parties" 
and agricultural interests, advocates of extending in the 
slavery and friends of restricting slavery. These 
various lines were so intertangled as to prevent definite 
"parties." It is convenient to speak of a "large-State 
party" and "a small-State party"; but the men who 
divided in this particular way on one great question found 
themselves in quite different combinations on almost every 
other problem. No praise is too high for the patience 
and "sweet reasonableness" (failing only with a few in- 
dividuals and on rare occasions) with which on all 
these matters the great statesmen of that inemorable 
assembly strove first to convince one another, and, failing 
that, to find a rational compromise. 



280 THE PHILADELPHIA CONVENTION, 1787 

High praise, too, is due their profound aversion to mere 
theory, their instinctive preference for that which had been 
Aversion to proveu good. Mr. Gladstone once said: "As the 
mere theory British constitution is the most subtle organism 
which has proceeded from progressive history, so the American 
constitution is the most wonderful work ever struck off at a 
given moment by the hand and purpose of man." This sen- 
tence has helped to spread the idea that the Philadelphia 
Convention invented a whole set of new institutions. Such 
an impression is mistaken. Practically every piece of political 
machinery in the Constitution was taken from the familiar 
workings of State constitutions. 

Some months before the meeting, Madison had drawn up 
several propositions concerning a new government, in letters 
The Virginia to Jcfferson and Washington. The Virginia dele- 
Pia° gates were the first to arrive at Philadelphia. 

While they waited for others, they caucused daily, formu- 
lating these suggestions of Madison's into the Virginia Plan. 
This plan provided for a two-House legislature. The lower 
House was to be chosen by the people and was to be appor- 
tioned among the States in proportion to population or wealth 
(so that Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts each 
would have sixteen or seventeen delegates to one from Dela- 
ware or Rhode Island). The upper House was to be chosen 
by the loiver. There was no provision for equality of the States 
in either branch of the legislature, and no security that a 
small State would have any part at all in the upper House. 
As to power, the central legislature was to fix its own limits. 
And it was to have an absolute veto upon any State legislation 
which it thought inconsistent with its own laws. This 
would have left the States hardly more than convenient 
administrative districts, and would have created a govern- 
ment more like that of modern France than like that of the 
present United States. It did not so much propose to amend 
the Confederation as to substitute a consolidated government. 
May 29, the Virginia Plan was presented to the Con- 
vention by Randolph in a brilliant speech, and for two 



VIRGINIA AND NEW JERSEY PLANS 281 

weeks, in committee of the whole, it was debated, clause by 
clause. Then came an interruption. So far, the large States 
had had things their own way ; but at last the The New 
small-State delegates had united upon the Neio Jersey Plan 
Jersey Plan, which was now presented by Patterson. This 
plan would merely have amended the old Confederation in 
some particulars. It would have given Congress power to 
impose tariffs and to use force against a delinquent State ; 
and it designed a true executive and an imposing federal 
judiciary. 

The committee of the whole gave another week to com- 
paring the two plans. Then, by a decisive vote, it set aside 
the new proposals and returned to the Virginia stages in 
Plan. From June 19 to July 26, nineteen resolu- *^^ ^^""^ 
tions, based on that plan and adopted in Committee, were 
considered again, in formal Convention, clause by clause. 
Midway in this period came the great crisis, when day by 
day the Convention tottered on the brink of disruption in the 
contest between large and small States. That calamity was 
finally averted by the Connecticut Compromise (page 283). 

The Convention then adjourned for eleven days, while 
the conclusions so far agreed upon were put into the form 
of a constitution, in Articles and Sections, by a Committee 
of Detail. From August 6 to September 10 this draft of a 
constitution was again considered, section by section. Next, 
a Committee of Revision (often referred to as the ^j^g q^j^_ 
"Committee on Style") redrafted the Constitu- mittee on 
tion according to the latest conclusions of the ^® 
Convention. To Gouverneur Morris, chairman of this com- 
mittee, we owe in large degree the admirable arrangement 
and clear wording of the document. Once more the Con- 
vention reviewed its work in this new form (September 
12-17). This time few changes were made ; and September 
17 the Constitution was signed by thirty-nine delegates, 
representing twelve States. 

Thirteen of the fifty -five delegates had left ; and three of 
those present (Randolph, Mason, and Gerry) refused to 



282 MAKING THE CONSTITUTION 

sign. Randolph afterwards urged ratification in Virginia, 
but Mason and Gerry remained earnest opponents of rati- 
fication. In July Mason had said that it could not be more 
inconvenient for any gentleman to remain absent from his 
private affairs than it was for him ; but he would "bury his 
bones in this city rather than expose his country to the con- 
sequences of a dissolution without anything being done." 
On August 31, however, he exclaimed that he "would sooner 
chop off his right hand than put it to the Constitution as it 
now stands." 

Early in the debates, the Connecticut delegates {Roger 
Sherman, Oliver Ellsworth, and William Johnson) had pro- 
The Con- posed a compromise between the Virginia and the 
necticut Ncw Jersey plans ; i.e. that the lower House of 
Compromise ^j^^ legislature should represent the people, and 
that the upper House should represent States, each State 
having there an equal vote. When feeling ran highest be- 
tween the large-State and small-State parties, this proposal 
was renewed with effect. 

Debate had grown violent. The small-State delegates 
served notice that they would not submit to the Virginia 
Plan. A large-State delegate threatened that if not per- 
suasion, then the sword, should unite the States. Small- 
State men retorted bitterly that they would seek European 
protection, if needful, against such coercion. 

Each State had one vote. Virginia, Pennsylvania, and 
Massachusetts were the true "large States"; but with 
them, on this issue, were ranged North Carolina, South 
Carolina, and Georgia. New Jersey, New York,' Dela- 
ware, Maryland, and Connecticut comprised the "small- 

^ New York was then little more than the valley of the Hudson. Hamilton, 
delegate from that State, was an extreme centralizer ; but he was outvoted always 
by his two colleagues. In the height of this debate, those gentlemen seceded from 
the Convention. After that. New York had no vote, since the legislature had 
provided that the State should not be represented by less than two of the three 
delegates. For this reason, Hamilton had little influence upon the work of the 
Convention. 



THE CONNECTICUT COMPROMISE 283 

State party." Rhode Island never appointed delegates, 
and the New Hampshire representatives were not on 
the ground until July 23. Had these two States taken 
part, the "small States" would have controlled the 
Convention from the first. 

The critical vote came July 2, after a week's strenuous 
debate. The first ten States to vote stood five to five. 
If either party won, the other was likely to organize a 
separate convention. Georgia was still to vote ; and one of 
her two delegates voted on the small-State side (against his 
own convictions), so as to throw away the vote of his State 
and leave the result a tie. 

This gave time for reflection. Said Roger Sherman, "We 
are now at full stop, and nobody [he supposed] meant that 
we should break up without doing something." In the 
desultory discussion that followed, several members sug- 
gested a committee to devise some compromise. Finally, 
the matter was referred to a Committee of Eleven, one from 
each State present. The moderate men icon their victory in 
selecting the members of this committee. The most un- 
compromising men in this dispute had been the great leaders 
from Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts, — Madison 
and Randolph, Wilson and Gouverneur Morris, and Rufus 
King. Desperate as the case stood, Madison and Wilson 
spoke against referring the question to a committee at all. 
Properly enough, these men were all left off the committee, 
the places from their States being filled by those of their col- 
leagues most in sympathy with small-State views, — Mason, 
Franklin, and Gerry. 

July 5, the committee reported once more the Connecticut 
Compromise. Large-State leaders were still opposed ; but, 
after ten days more of debate, the plan carried. This "First 
Great Compromise of the Constitution" has made our 
government partly national, partly federal. Each citizen 
of the United States is subject, directly, to two distinct 
authorities, — the National government and a State govern- 
ment. The National government acts directly upon him. 



284 MAKING THE CONSTITUTION 

but only within a prescribed field. Elsewhere the State 
retains complete authority, — as supreme within its domain 
as the Central government in its. Neither government has 
any right to trespass on the field of the other. 

The Constitution tried to mark off the two fields from one 
another by three devices : (1) by "enumerating," in eighteen 
paragraphs, the powers given to Congress ; (2) by forbidding 
certain powers to the States ; and (3) by providing (ex- 
pressly in the tenth amendment, and by implication through- 
out) that powers not granted to the Central government 
are reserved to the States. It is customary, therefore, to 
call our government "a government of enumerated powers."" 

The enumerated powers are vast. They include sole 
control over foreign relations (with the making of peace 
The "enu- ^^^ War, and maintaining armies and navies) ; 
merated and, in domestic matters, the control of naturaliza- 
powers tion, coinage, and weights and measures, the post 

oflBce and postal service, copyrights and patents, commerce 
between citizens living in different States, and taxation so 
far as needful to enable the government to care for all these 
duties. 

Still, these powers touch our daily life less closely and less 
vitally than do the powers reserved to the States. The State 
regulates the franchise (indirectly, even the Federal fran- 
chise ^), marriage and divorce and all family relations, in- 
heritance, education, all property and industrial conditions 
(except those that may be connected with interstate com- 
merce), and all criminal law, as well as the powers of towns, 
counties, and other local units. 

In a federal government there is inevitably a constant 
contest between the advocates of stronger central control 
and the upholders of the rights of the States. In power, 
either party is apt to seek to extend the province of the 
government. In opposition, the same party appeals to 
States rights, to restrict a power which seems dangerous 
in the hands of opponents. The party anxious to limit the 

^ Except as certain provisions have been put beyond the control of either State 
or Congress by the Fifteenth and Nineteenth amendments. 



IMPLIED POWERS 285 

Central government has always sought to restrict it closely 
to the "Enumerated powers." Its opponents have met this 
war cry with the shibboleth, '^Implied powers.'" implied 
Under cover of this phrase a vast development of powers 
National power has taken place. Thus the Constitution gave 
Congress power to regulate interstate commerce. To the 
men of that day, that power meant only authority to prevent 
one State from setting up barriers against another's com- 
merce. Under the same phrase to-day Congress regulates 
railroad freight rates on commerce, adulteration of foods 
(character of goods carried in this commerce), and com- 
pensation by railroad companies for injuries to employees. 
This expansion of National authority is essential to our 
well-being. The States are no longer competent to manage 
these common interests. Steam and electricity, and inti- 
mate trade relations, make many matters fit subjects for 
National control now which were better off in the hands of 
the States a hundred years ago. It would be better, no 
doubt, to give such powers distinctly to the Central govern- 
ment by adding them to the enumeration of powers ; but 
our Constitution makes such amendment exceedingly 
difficult, and so it is fortunate that we can meet new needs 
as they arise by even this dangerous process of "forced 
construction" at the hands of Congress and the Supreme 
Court. Says James Bryce, — 

"They [the men of the Philadelphia Convention] foresaw that 
their work would need to be elucidated by judicial commentary ; 
but they were far from conjecturing the enormous strain to which 
some of their expressions would be subjected in the effort to apply 
them to new facts. . . . The Americans have more than once 
bent their constitution, that they might not be forced to break it." 

In expanding "implied powers," two expressions in the 
Constitution have been especially appealed to, — the "gen- 
eral welfare" clause, and the "necessary and proper" clause. 

1. The words "to provide for the general welfare "occur 
twice, — once in the preamble, once in the first paragraph of 
the enumeration of powers. In the preamble the clause 



286 MAKING THE CONSTITUTION 

could not convey power ; and, moreover, in that connection, 
the words are taken from a similar passage in the old Articles 

of Confederation. In the other passage (Art. I, 
" General sec. 8) , paragraphing and punctuation show beyond 
Welfare reasonable dispute — as does also the history of 

the clause in the Convention — that "to . . . 
provide for the general welfare" is not an independent grant 
of power, coordinate with "to lay taxes," or "to coin money," 
but that it simply indicates the purpose for which taxes are 
to be laid. This, too, is the decision of the Supreme Court 
(Chief Justice Marshall, in Gibbons vs. Ogden). 

2. In " necessary and proper," "necessary " would at first 
seem to be the stronger word. Why is "proper" added .'^ 

Does the passage mean that a power should not 
" necessary be used, eveu if necessary, unless also proper ? Or 
and proper" does " iieccssarv " mean merely conve?iient? The 

latter interpretation has been adopted by the 
courts. This phrase is the true basis for the growth of the doc- 
trine of implied powers. At Philadelphia its possibilities were 
seen only by Mason and Gerry — to be dreaded by them. 

The Convention decided without great trouble that in the 
first Congress the Representatives should be divided among 
East and the thirteen States in proportion to population ; but 
West Morris and the New Englanders struggled to pre- 

vent the adoption of proportional representation as a perma- 
nent principle. After the gov<ernment should once have been 
instituted, argued Morris, let Congress provide for reappor- 
tionment (or refuse to provide it) as it might think best 
from time to time. His purpose, he stated frankly, was to 
prevent any true reapportionment so far as would concern 
new States from the West. "The new States will know 
less of the public interest," said he, and "will not be able 
to furnish men equally enlightened." Even in the old 
States, he added, "the back members [western members] 
are always the most averse to the best measures." Several 
other delegates urged that the total representation from new 
States ought never to exceed that from the original thirteen. 



I 



AND SLAVERY 287 

But the Virginia delegation stood forth as the champions 
of the West. Mason argued unanswerably that both 
justice and policy demanded that new States "6e treated 
as equals, and subjected to no degrading discriminations.'' 
This view prevailed. On motion of Randolph, the Con- 
stitution itself provides for a census, and for reapportion- 
ment, every tenth year. 

Another sectional quarrel grew out of this question of 
apportionment. The South wanted slaves to count as men. 
Many Northern members were vehemently opposed ^j^g 
to this, both because of a rising sentiment against " Federal 
slavery, and because they feared an undue weight 
for the South in Congress. The outcome was the ^'Second 
Great Compromise,'' — the three fifths ratio, so that five slaves 
should count as three free persons in fixing the number of 
Representatives from a State. 

The " Third Great Compromise," also, was concerned with 
slavery. New England wished Congress to have power over 
commerce, so that it might encourage American 
shipping against foreign competition. The South 
feared that Congress, with this power, might tax the great 
Southern exports, cotton, rice, and tobacco, or even prevent 
further importation of slaves. Finally Congress was given 
power to regulate commerce, providing, however, (1) that it 
should not tax exports ; and (2) that for twenty years it 
should not forbid the importation of slaves. 

Georgia and South Carolina felt that they must have more 
slaves to develop their rice swamps, and made it clear that they 
would not come into the Union unless their interests in this matter 
were guarded. Virginia, Delaware, and Maryland (and North 
Carolina in part) had already prohibited the foreign slave trade 
by State laws. The most powerful advocate of national prohibition 
upon the trade was George Mason, a great Virginia slaveholder. 
He pointed out the futility of State restrictions, if the vast North- 
west was to be filled with slaves through the ports of South Carolina 
and Georgia, and he argued therefore that the matter concerned 
not those States alone. "Slavery," he continued, "discourages 
arts and manufactures. The poor despise labor when performed 



288 MAKING THE CONSTITUTION 

by slaves. They prevent the immigration of Whites, who really 
strengthen a country. They produce the most pernicious effect on 
manners. Every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant. They 
bring the judgment of heaven on a country. As nations cannot 
be punished in the next world, they must be in this." 

The Judiciary has been called fitly "that part of our govern- 
ment on uihich the rest hinges " : it decides controversies 
The between States, and between State and Nation ; it 

Judiciary even Overrides Congress ; and its life tenure makes 
it independent of control. 

1. A final arbiter was needed somewhere, in case of con- 
flict between State and Nation. The Virginia Plan gave 
the decision to the Federal legislature. The New Jersey 
Plan gave it to the State judiciaries. It was finally placed 
in the Federal judiciary by a provision for appeals from State 
courts. This clause was "the sleeping lion of the Con- 
stitution." Its importance seems not to have been fully 
understood at the time, even in the Convention. Had its 
bearing been comprehended by the people of the country, 
the Constitution would almost certainly have failed of 
ratification. 

2. The power to declare an Act of Congress void does not 
come from any express provision of the Constitution. It is 
based upon judicial custom in England and America. Cen- 
turies before, in conflicts between king and parliament, 
English courts had sometimes claimed the right to say which 
authority should prevail. This rare power of the English 
judiciary had now virtually disappeared, because the Eng- 
lish Revolution of 1688 had done away with such conflicts. 
Throughout colonial times, however, the English privy 
council, acting as a court of appeal, had voided Acts of 
colonial legislatures which it thought in conflict with 
charters or with English laws. As soon as the colonies 
became States, the State courts assumed the like right to 
decide between State legislation and more fundamental law 
(a State constitution, or an ancient principle of the Common 
law). 



THE FEDERAL JUDICIARY 289 

Such cases had been very rare. In New Jersey, in 1780, 
the highest court declared an act of the legislature void 
because inconsistent with the State Constitution its power 
("Holmes vs. Walton") and three of the New Jo veto 
Jersey delegates at Philadelphia had been connected as uncon- 
with the case, on the bench or as counsel. There stitutionai 
was a like decision in Virginia in 1782, and an opinion 
to the same effect from the North Carolina court just as 
the Philadelphia Convention was gathering. The Rhode 
Island case has been described. These- seem to be the only 
instances from 1776 to 1787, and, outside the lawyer class, 
the people resented the practice bitterly. Even within the 
Convention, some members disliked it ; but they understood 
clearly that the Federal courts ivould test Federal legislation 
by comparing it with the Constitution, and would void such 
acts as were "plainly" unconstitutional. 

Since that time, however, the po2ver has been extended, 
both by Federal and State courts, to a degree undreamed 
in 1787 by its most ardent champions.^ Especially has 
this been true of the Federal Supreme Court, which, be- 
cause of its life tenure, has been more independent of pub- 
lic opinion than State Courts have been. Through this 
development, the Supreme Court has become not merely 
the "guardian" of the Constitution, but also the chief 
"amender" of the Constitution. 

3. Hamilton and his group failed to get life tenure for 
President and Senate ; but they did get it for the judiciary. 
In early English history, the judges had been re- its life 
movable at the king's pleasure. The Stuart tyrants tenure 
abused this power and debased the courts into servile tools. 
Therefore the English Revolution of 1688 provided that 
judges should be removed only " on address." That is, a judge 
held for life, unless two thirds of parliament voted that he 
should be removed. For such vote, however, no formal 

^ In one year recently (1906) 101 State laws were declared unconstitutional by 
supreme courts, State or Federal. This peculiar American power of the courts 
is not a necessary accompaniment of a written constitution. It is not found in 
any of the European republics with written constitutions. 



290 MAKING THE CONSTITUTION 

trial was necessary, or even formal charges of wrong- 
doing. English courts were made dependent upon the 
approval of parliament. 

But the Federal Constitution gave the courts a tenure 
more independent than had ever been known in England. 
Federal judges hold "during good behavior," and can be 
removed, not by address, but only by impeachment, — i.e. 
conviction for "treason, bribery, or other high crime or 
misdemeanor," by a two-thirds vote of the Senate, after 
legal trial upon specific charges. Without affording any 
opening for such charges, the judiciary may thwart the 
popular will and the will of every other branch of the 
government for years. 

The men of the Convention meant to establish a true 
electoral college to choose the President. They thought they 
^jjg had done so, and they prided themselves particu- 

eiectorai larly upou tliis part of their work. They supposed 
CO ege there would be chosen in each State a select body 

of men, of high social standing and large property, and that 
these several bodies would appoint a chief executive after 
calm deliberation. But the growth of sentiment for popular 
government, together with the development of party nominations, 
has made the electoral college obsolete. The form, indeed, 
survives. Technically each " elector " is still at liberty to vote 
his private choice for President and to change his mind, be- 
fore voting, as often as he likes. But, in reality, each 
"elector" is chosen to vote for a particular candidate; and 
unwritten law makes it impossible for him to think of doing 
otherwise. The "electors" have been transformed into 
"mere letter carriers." The voter rarely reads their names 
on the tickets. 

The theory Eighteenth century liberals believed in "checks 
of checks ami balances'' in government. In England, be- 
anceslii ^^^^ ^^^^ y^^^^ 1400, ccuturics of struggle against 
England an irresponsible monarchy had built into the "con- 
menca ^.tjt^tiQ^^ " ^^ system of reciprocal checks. No 
one part of the government — king, lords, or commons — 



PROPERTY RIGHTS 291 

could do anything of consequence against the determined 
opposition of any other part. This elaborate system of 
balances had been a victory for freedom ; and it came to be 
looked upon as a necessary feature of free government. After 
the publication of Blackstone's law writings (1770), the 
"separation of powers" {i.e. the reciprocal independence of 
executive, legislative, and judicial departments) became 
almost an axiom in English political thought. 

In reality, however, as we can now see, English practice by 
1787 was already a century ahead of the doctrine. The 
Revolution of 1688 had made the popular branch of the 
government supreme, except for a modified veto by the 
Lords. The system of "checks " had practically disappeared 
in England (in favor of a truer democracy), when it was 
adopted, in most elaborate form, in this American Con- 
stitution. Moreover, while in England it had been originally 
devised as a protection against an arbitrary monarch, it was 
adopted in America mainly as a protection against a ''tur- 
bulent people.'"' The "balances" in the Constitution have 
sometimes made for stability, but they have also often pro- 
duced harmful deadlocks. When the people, after a long 
campaign, have deliberately chosen a House of Represen- 
tatives to carry out their settled policy, they often have to 
wait two years to get around a Presidential veto, and per- 
haps two years or four years more before they have a chance 
to change a hostile hold-over majority in the Senate. Even 
then, a Supreme Court, by a vote of five to four, may nullify 
the popular will for a generation longer. 

Repeatedly the Convention refused to entertain a motion 
for a bill of rights for men ; ^ but, besides the guardianship 
for wealth expected from Senate, President, and Absence of 
Supreme Court, it inserted two express provisions to a bui of 
shield property. (1) Even the Federal government "^ 
can take private property only "by due process of law," — 

* Articles IV and VI of the Constitution, it is true, do contain some essential 
provisions of a bill of rights, — the strict definition of treason as compared with 
the meaning of that term in many other countries ; the prohibition against ex post 
facto laws and bills of attainder; and the restriction upon suspension of the writ 
of habeas corpus. 



292 MAKING THE CONSTITUTION 

i.e. through the decision of a court after judicial trial ; and 
(2) the States are forbidden to pass any law "impairing the 
Security for obligation of contracts." By reason of these 
property clauses, says President Hadley of Yale, property 
interests in America are "'in a stronger position against 
any attempt at government control than they are in any 
European country. ^^ {The Independent, April 16, 1908.) 

President Hadley points out that the first provision has 
resulted in "preventing a majority of the voters, acting 
in the legislature or through the courts (the convenient 
European methods), from correcting evils in railroad build- 
ing or factory operation until the stockholders or owners have 
had opportunity to have the case tried in the courts'" ; and, as 
the same article makes plain, the courts have usually been 
inclined to favor the vested property interests. The perni- 
cious results of the second provision could not well have 
been foreseen. They have come about through a remark- 
able decision of the Supreme Court (the Dartmouth College 
Case, 1819) extending the meaning of the word "contract" 
to include even the grants of privilege and power made by 
a State itself to public-service corporations. As a conse- 
quence, many such corporations have been inviolably in- 
trenched, for an indefinite period,^ in special privileges 
which they got from corrupt legislatures and for which they 
give no fit return to society. In the hundred years from 
1803 to 1903, the Federal Supreme Court declared fifty-seven 
State laws unconstitutional on the ground that they impaired 
the obligation of some "contract." Most of these had aimed 
only at needful regulation of great corporations in the interest 
of social well-being, — such legislation as is common in Eu- 
ropean democracies like England or France or Switzerland. 

1 According to the spirit of this decision, unless the State has limited the life- 
time of a grant, or has expressly reserved its own right to change the grant at will, 
the grant runs forever. In recent years, the States have in great measure guarded 
themselves against such danger for the future by expressly reserving their right to 
modify all such grants. A recent amendment to the constitution of Wisconsin 
runs: "All acts [dealing with corporations] may be altered and repealed by the 
legislature at any time.'' This provision, now, is a part of the "contract" when 
the Wisconsin legislature grants a franchise. 



THE FRANCHISE 293 

The Convention would have liked a much more aristo- 
cratic Constitution ; but the members saw that if the Con- 
stitution were clearly less democratic than a given Democracy 
State constitution, it would be hard to secure inevitable 
ratification in that State. It was not going to be easy to 
get States enough at best. And so we owe such democratic 
character as the Constitution has, in great degree, to the rela- 
tively unknown men, who, ten years before, framed the Revolu- 
tionary State constitutions. 

This was shown in the settlement of the franchise. The 
House of Representatives was the only part of the govern- 
ment left to be chosen directly by "the people." The 
But who were "the people" in this political sense ? franchise 
Hamilton, Morris, and Dickinson strove earnestly to limit the 
franchise to freeholders, — so as to exclude "those multi- 
tudes without property and without principle, with whom 
our country, like all others, will, in time, abound." Even 
Madison expressed himself as theoretically in favor of such 
restriction, fearing that a property less majority would either 
plunder the rich or become the tools of an aristocracy. 
Franklin argued vigorously against the restriction, urging 
the educational value of the franchise for the masses ; and 
George Mason, in the language of his bill of rights of 1776, 
declared, "The true idea is that every man having evidence 
of attachment to the community, and permanent common 
interest with it, ought to share in all its rights and privileges," 
But the defeat of the restriction was due not to these lonely 
champions, but to the reminder that in more than half the 
States the State franchise was already wider than landholding, 
and that no voter could be expected to favor a Constitution 
that would disfranchise him in the Federal government. 
The provision finally adopted, therefore, aimed to keep the 
franchise as restricted as was compatible with probable 
ratification. The Federal franchise was to be no wider in 
any State than the State franchise in that State. 

This arrangement worked, unexpectedly, for democracy. 
The States, acting one by one, modified their constitutions 
in the direction of democracy faster than one great unit like 



294 MAKING THE CONSTITUTION 

the Nation could have done ; and as any State extended its 
own franchise, so far it extended also the Federal franchise. 

The "two critical decisions'' of the Federal Convention 
were : (l) to substitute a new plan of government, — instead 
The plan for of trying merely to "patch up" the old constitu- 
ratification ^jqj^ • ^nd (2) to put that new government into opera- 
tion ivhen it should he accepted by nine States, without waiting 
for all of them. This last decision was directly contrary to 
instructions from the State legislatures which had appointed 
the delegates. It was also in conflict with a specific provision 
in the Articles of Confederation, — to which the States had 
solemnly pledged "their sacred faith." But men had come 
to see that America must either strangle in the grip of the 
old constitution, or she must break its bonds. Constitutional 
remedy had proved impossible. Wisely and patriotically 
the Convention recommended an unconstitutional remedy, 
and the country adopted it. The ratification of the Con- 
stitution was a peaceful revolution. A friendly looker-on 
wrote : — 

" Here, too, I saw some pretty shows : a revolution without 
blows : 
For, as I understood the cunning elves, the people all re- 
volted from themselves." 

When Congress received the Constitution from the Con- 
vention, it recommended the State legislatures to call State 
conventions to accept or reject it. The contest 
in the was uow transferred from Philadelphia to the 

country at couutry at large. The advocates of the "new 
roof" shrewdly took to themselves the name 
Federalists,^ instead of the unpopular term Nationalists, and 
so left to their opponents only the weak appellation Antifed- 

' Luther Martin of Maryland, who withdrew from the Philadelphia Convention 
towards its close, in justifying his action to the Maryland legislature, explains that 
the Convention had voted down a resolution for a "federal" form of government 
and had adopted instead a resolution for a "national government" : "Afterwards 
the word 'national' was struck out by them, because they thought the word might 
tend to alarm ; and although now they who advocate this system pretend to call 
themselves federalists, in Convention the distinction was quite the reverse." 



FEDERALISTS AND ANTIFEDERALISTS 295 

eralists. A torrent of pamphlets and newspaper articles 
issued from the press, ^ and every crossroads was a stage for 
vehement oratory. 

The proposed Constitution was attacked partly for its 
encroachments on the States, partly for its undemocratic 
features. Opponents pointed to the absence of a bill of 
rights, and to the infrequency of elections, and to the vast 
powers of the President and Senate (parts of the government 
remote from popular control). George Mason asserted 
that such a Constitution "must end either in monarchy or 
tyrannical aristocracy," and a sarcastic democrat, claiming 
to be a Turk, praised the Constitution for "its resemblance 
to our much admired Sublime Porte." The real source of 
apprehension, however, was not any specific provision in the 
document so much as a vague distrust of the aristocratic 
Convention. Many people believed sincerely that the 
meeting at Philadelphia had been a "deep and dark con- 
spiracy against the liberties of a free people." Thus "John 
Humble" ironically exhorted his fellow "low-born," duti- 
fully to allow the few "well-born" to set up their "Divine 
Constitution" and rule the country. 

Still both parties had to admit the seriousness of the 
existing situation. The Antifederalists had no remedy to 
propose. The Federalists offered one for which they claimed 
no peculiar excellence, but which, they urged, did offer 
escape from anarchy, — probably the only escape likely to 
be available. Under such pressure, many a flaming Anti- 
federalist, elected to a State convention expressly to reject 
the Constitution, came over to its support ; and more per- 
sonal arguments were not omitted. In Massachusetts the 
Federalists brought over Hancock by promising him a re- 
election as governor and apparently implying strongly 
that he should be the first Vice-President of the new govern- 
ment. 

The Constitution was sent forth September 17, 1787. A 
strenuous nine-months campaign brought it a bare victory. 

^ The most famous set of such essays appeared week after week in New York 
papers under the title The Federalist, written by Hamilton, Madison, and Jay. 



296 MAKING THE CONSTITUTION 

Organized and ready, the Federalists at first carried all 
before them, securing ratification during December and 
January in Delaware, New Jersey, Georgia, Connecticut, 
and, after a bitter struggle, in Pennsylvania. A long 
debate and the tardy aid of Sam Adams converted a 
hostile majority in Massachusetts, by a close vote ; and 
somewhat later, Maryland and South Carolina were added 
to the list, making eight States. 

The remaining States were long doubtful or opposed. 
North Carolina and Rhode Island refused to ratify. They 
Ratification could be spared, — as perhaps could have been New 
by conven- Hampshire, whose convention had adjourned for 
^^°^^ some months without action ; but a failure in New 

York or Virginia would have upset the whole movement. In 
the conventions of both these States, as in that of Massachu- 
setts and Pennsylvania, there was at first a strong hostile 
majority ; and, after many weeks of argument and persua- 
sion, to have defeated ratification would have required in 
Narrow the final vote a change in Virginia, of only 5 out 
majorities ^f ^gg^ ^ud in New York, of 2 out of 57. Even 
these slim majorities for the Constitution were obtained 
only by pledges from the Federalists that they would join in 
getting certain desired amendments as soon as the new 
government should be in working order. 

In general the commercial centers favored the Con- 
stitution, while the agricultural and especially the western 
sections opposed it. In all the critical States a direct vote 
of the people would surely have rejected it. There was 
only one such test. The Rhode Island legislature, instead 
of calling a convention, distributed copies of the Con- 
stitution among the voters and provided for a popular 
vote. The Federalists, certain of defeat, declaimed against 
this method, and remained away from the polls. The vote 
stood 2708 to 232, against ratification. Two years later, a 
convention accepted the Constitution, 34 to 32. 

The New Hampshire convention changed its mind, and 
ratified on June 15, 1788 (making the ninth State) ; but 



RATIFICATION 



297 



the absolutely essential accession of Virginia did not take 
place until June 25, — just in time for word to reach 
the North for the Fourth of July celebrations. At Albany 
the news caused the wildest excitement. The Federalists 
celebrated by firing ten guns for the new government. The 
Antis retorted with thirteen guns for the Confederation, 
which, they claimed, was still the constitutional govern- 
ment. Afterwards, they made a bonfire of a copy of the 
new Constitution and of the handbills announcing Virginia's 
ratification. In the ashes, the rallied Federalists planted 
a lofty pole with another copy of the Constitution nailed 
to the top. This Federalist jubilation was justified. The 



Eighth Federal PILLAR reared 




From the Boston Independent Chronicle, June 12, 1788. (The Chronicle guessed 
wrong as to the order of the 9th and 10th states.) 

influence of Virginia's accession and the tireless logic of 
Hamilton at last prevailed in the New York convention, 
and the new Constitution had won. 



Who ratified the Constitution ? The several States, as 
States ? Or one consolidated people ? The second view 
rests wholly on the opening words of the pre- Ratification 
amble : "We, the people of the United States ... by states 
do ordain and establish this constitution." Merely °^ 
as language, these words have no more value than the Fifth 
Article of the Constitution, which says twice that the ratify- 
ing parties are the States : and such slight significance as 
the preamble might otherwise have disappears upon tracing 
its history. 

The preamble appeared first in the report of the Com- 
mittee of Detail; but it then read "We, the people of the 



298 RATIFICATION OF THE CONSTITUTION 

States of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island [and 
so on through the list] do ordain," etc. Plainly, this did 
not mean a consolidated nation. It meant thirteen peoples, 
each acting directly, not through legislatures. The Convention 
accepted this wording without debate. Almost at the close 
of the Convention, the Committee on Style changed the 
words to their present form. No explanation was ever 
made by a member of the Convention for the change, but 
it explains itself. The Convention had now decided to put 
the neiv government into operation between the first nine States 
ratifying. It was impossible to name these in advance, 
and it would be highly improper to name any which might 
not come in ; so all names were dropped out. No change 
of meaning was designed. The new form, like the first, was 
accepted without debate. 

Outside the Convention, however, this was at first not 
understood ; and States-rights men feared that the wording 
did mean a consolidated people, — until Madison assured 
them that it did not. Samuel Adams wrote to Richard 
Henry Lee, "I stumble at the threshold." And in the 
Virginia Convention, Patrick Henry exclaimed, — "What 
right had they to say, ' We, the people ' . . . instead of ' We, 
the States ' ? If the States be not the parties to this com- 
pact, it must be one great consolidated national government 
of the people of all the States." Madison answered : "Who 
are the parties ? The people ; but not the people as com- 
posing one great body: the people as composing thirteen 
sovereignties.'" Otherwise, he adds in proof, a majority 
would bind all the States; "but, sir, no State is bound, as 
it is, without its own consent." And he went on to explain 
that the words mean only that in each State the people were 
to act in the most solemn way, not merely through the 
usual legislative channel. 

In the Federalist (No. 39) Madison amplified this thought : 
Ratification "is to be given by the people, not as individuals, 
but as composing the distinct and independent States to 
which they respectively belong. It is the assent and rati- 



BY THE STATES 299 

fication of the several States, derived from the Supreme 
authority in each State, — the authority of the people 
themselves [not merely from the subordinate authority of 
the State legislature] . . . Each State, in ratifying the Con- 
stitution, is considered as a sovereign body, independent of 
all others, and only to be bound by its own voluntary act." 
This answer was final at the time. But thirty years 
later, the doctrine of ratification by a consolidated people 
was revived by Chief Justice Marshall. It was soon given 
added emphasis by the massive oratory of Daniel Webster, 
and the idea took its place in the mind of the North as an 
essential article in the creed of patriotism. The plain 
historical fact, however, is that the thirteen States, looking 
upon themselves as thirteen distinct sovereignties, and, 
feeling absolutely free either to accept or reject the Con- 
stitution, did decide to accept it, — and, by so doing, made 
possible the future development of one nation. Says William 
McDonald {Jacksonian Democracy, 109, 110): — 

"Webster's doctrine of 'the people' was a glorious fiction. It 
has entered into the warp and woof of our constitutional creed ; 
but it was fiction, nevertheless. ... // anything is clear in the 
history of the United States, it is that the Constitution was 
established by the States, acting through conventions authorized 
by the legislatures thereof, and not by the people of the United 
States, in any such sense as Webster had in mind. . . . No theory 
could have a slighter foundation." 



CHAPTER XVI 

FEDERALIST ORGANIZATION 
I. MAKING THE CONSTITUTION MOVE 

September 13, 1786, the dying Continental Congress pro- 
vided for elections under the new Constitution. Nine 
States were present when that vote was taken. A week 
later, the attendance had sunk to six States. Thereafter, 
to keep up a shadow of government, a few delegates met 
day by day, had their names recorded in the journal, and 
then adjourned to some favorite tavern. Congress expired 
for want of a quorum several months before the new govern- 
ment was organized. 

The elections that made Washington President were very 
different from elections in a presidential campaign now. 
The election I^hode Island and North Carolina had not yet 
of Washing- comc into the union, and New York lost her vote 
*°° (as explained on the next page). Thus only ten 

States took part. In six of these, the legislatures chose the 
presidential electors. Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia 
chose them by popular vote, in districts. Massachusetts 
used a quaint union of these two methods (the people in 
each Congressional district nominating three electors from 
whom the legislature chose one — with two more at large to 
make up the proper number). In no State did the people elect 
directly, on one general ticket, as is almost always done to-day. 

Two legislatures gave forceful illustrations of the bitter- 
ness of party spirit and of disregard of the people's will by 
PecuUarities "delegated " government. In elections by legisla- 
of the tures, custom favored a joint hcdlot (the two Houses 

e ection voting as one body) ; and this method was used 
without question in five of the six States which chose electors 
by legislatures. But in New Hampshire, the upper House 

300 



I 



THE ELECTIONS OF 1788 301 

was Federalist, while the more numerous and more represent- 
ative lower House was Antifederalist. The Senate insisted 
upon a concurrent vote — as ordinary bills are passed — so that 
it might have a veto on the other House. The wrangle lasted 
for weeks. At the last moment, the larger House sur- 
rendered, and chose electors acceptable to the smaller one. 
In New York the situation was similar ; but there the Anti- 
federalist House refused to yield its right, and that State 
lost its vote altogether. 

There had been no formal nominations. Washington 
received the 69 votes cast for President. For Vice Presi- 
dent there was no such agreement. Some of the Antifed- 
eralists hoped to elect George Clinton of New York, Ham- 
ilton's chief adversary there ; but the plan fell to pieces 
when New York failed to take part in the election. Eleven 
names were voted for by the 69 electors. John Adams was 
elected, but by only 34 votes, — one less than half, but 
enough before the Twelfth amendment. 

The Continental Congress had named the first Wednes- 
day in March for the inauguration of the new government at 
New York City. On that day, however, only 8 ojiatory 
Senators, out of *22, and 13 Representatives, out methods of 
of 59, had arrived, and the electoral votes could not °"^®^^ 
he counted. The tv»^o Houses met from day to day, for roll 
call, and sent occasional urgent entreaties to dilatory mem- 
bers in neighboring States ; but not till almost five weeks 
later (April 6) was ihe necessary quorum secured. On 
April 30, W^ashington was inaugurated with great state and 
solemnit3^ It is easier to understand these delays when we 
remember that Washington, now nearly sixty years old, had 
to make the twelve-day journey from Mount Vernon to New 
York on horseback. 

For nearly three weeks. Congress wrangled over matters 
of ceremony. After solemn deliberation, the 
Senate recommended that Washington ])e styled tion of titles 
''His Highness, President of the United States of and royal 
America and the Protector of the Liberties of the 
Same." (John Adams would have preferred "His Majesty 



302 



THE FEDERALIST PERIOD, 1788-1800 



the President.") The more democratic Representatives in- 
sisted on giving only the title used in the Constitution — 
"President of the United States." Finally this House sent 

an address to Washing- 
ton by this title ; and 
the Senate had to lay 
aside its tinsel. 

During the debate, 
one particularly quaint 
episode occurred. The 
minutes of the Senate 
referred to the speech 
with which Washington 
had "opened" Congress 
as "His most gracious 
speech." This was the 
form always used in the 
English parliament re- 
garding the speech from 
the Throne. Senator 
Maclay objected to the 
phrase, and finally it was 
struck from the record. 
Vice President Adams, 
however, defended it 
hotly, declaring (accord- 
ing to Maclay) that if he could have foreseen such agitation, 
he ''would never have drawn his sword' ^ against England in 
the Revolution. Maclay tells ^ us, too, that Adams (presid- 

* William Maclay, from western Pennsylvania, was one of the few democratic 
Senators. During his term of oflBce he kept a diary, quite in the Pepys style, 
with exceedingly intimate entries (as to weekly or more occasional baths, for in- 
stance) but also with much exceedingly valuable matter. This Journal should 
be accessible to every student of this period. Maclay was an honest, well-meaning, 
rather suspicious man, without breadth of view, or social graces, but with an ardent 
belief in popular government. He was no hero worshiper. John Adams (his 
pet aversion) is credited with "a very silly kind of laugh . . . the most unmeaning 
simper that ever dimpled the face of folly." Madison is styled " His Littleness." 
Hamilton appears with " a very boyish giddy manner." And even Jefferson wears 
"a rambling, vacant look." 




John Adams. From the Stuart portrait, now 
belonging to the New York Historical 
Society. 



OLD WORLD TRAPPINGS LAID ASIDE 303 

ing in the Senate) spoke forty minutes from the chair in 
opposition to the simple form of title for the President. 
"What," he exclaimed, "will the common people of other 
countries, what will the sailors and soldiers, say of 'George 
Washington, President of the United States'? They will 
despise him to all eternity !" On the other hand. Senator 
Grayson of Virginia wrote indignantly, in a letter to Patrick 
Henry, — "Is it not strange that John Adams, son of a tinker 
and creature of the people, should be for titles, dignities, and 
preheminences ! " And Jefferson, in Paris, exulted at the 
defeat of the proposed title: "I hope that the titles of 
Excellency, Honor, Worship, Esquire, forever disappear 
from among us from that moment. I wish that of Mr. 
["Master,"still connoting social rank] would follow them." 

Soon after, the struggle was renewed on the bill to estab- 
lish the mint. It was proposed that each coin should bear 
the image of the President during whose administration it 
was coined — after the fashion of all royal coinage. A few 
radicals attacked this "disposition to ape monarchic prac- 
tice," and the proposal was dropped, in favor of the use of 
an emblematic and none too artistic "Goddess of Liberty." 

It has been too much the custom to ridicule the ob- 
jectors to these "harmless" forms and titles in this critical 
struggle for simplicity. The titles were "harm- 
less"; but the spirit in which they were de- simpUcity 
manded was not. That spirit was quite as vio- ^°** ***" 
lent and ridiculous as was the democratic opposi- 
tion to it. The aristocrats believed that government ought 
to be hedged about with ceremonial to secure due reverence 
from its "'subjects.'''' It is easy to find matter for laughter 
in some acts of the democratic opposition ; but at least let 
us acknowledge gratefully our debt to it for turning the cur- 
rent of x\nierican practice away from Old World trappings 
of childish or slavish ceremonial toward manly simplicity 
and democratic common sense. 

Other questions had to do not merely with ceremony, 
but with power. The Constitution requires the consent 
of the Senate to Presidential appointments and to treaties, 



304 THE FEDERALIST PERIOD, 1788-1800 

but does not say how that consent shall be given. Wash- 
ington and his Cabinet were at first inclined to treat 
Evolution ^^^® Senate as an English monarch treated his 
of Con- Privy Council. When the first nomination for 

practic"- ^ foreign minister came up (June 17), Vice Presi- 
President dent Adams attempted to take the "advice and 
an enate consent" of the Senators one by one, viva voce. 
This attack upon the independence of the Senate was foiled 
by Maclay, who insisted upon vote by ballot. 

A still more important incident concerned a treaty with 
certain Indian tribes. Instead of sending the printed docu- 
ment to the Senate for consideration (as is done now), 
Washington came in person (August 22), took the Vice 
President's presiding chair, asked Secretary Knox to read 
the treaty aloud (which was done hurriedly and indistinctly) , 
and then called at once for ^'advice and consent,'" to be given 
in his presence. As Maclay properly observes, there was 
"no chance for a fair investigation while the President of 
the United States sat there with his Secretary of War to 
support his opinions and overawe the timid and neutral." 
The question was being put, when Maclay 's sturdy repub- 
licanism once more intervened. He called for certain other 
papers bearing on the subject, and this resulted in post- 
ponement. Maclay asserts that Washington received the 
first interruption with "an aspect of stern displeasure," 
and that at the close he "started up in a violent fret," ex- 
claiming, "This defeats every purpose of my coming here." 
The whole incident should give some comfort to those 
Americans who grieve at recent dissensions between Presi- 
dent and Senate over treaties of mightier import. 

The Constitution, by its language, suggests single heads 
for executive departments (rather than the committees cus- 
Evoiution tomary under the old Confederation) . Congress at 
of the once established the departments of State, Treas- 

Cabinet ^^.^^ ^^^ War, — together with an Attorney -Gen- 
eralship. Washington appointed as the three "Secretaries," 
Jefferson, Hamilton, and Henry Kjiox, and made Edmund 



THE JUDICIARY OF 1789 305 

Randolph the Attorney-General. These officials were de- 
signed, separately, to advise and assist the President ; but 
neither the Act of Congress nor the Constitution made any 
reference to them as a roZ/echW body, — that is, as a" Cabinet." 
Indeed, several proposals for such an advisory council had 
been voted down in the Federal Convention. Only by custom 
has the Cabinet become an important part of our government. 
The Constitution provides merely that the President "may 
require the opinion, in uriting, of the principal officer in 
each of the executive departments, upon any subject re- 
lating to the duties of their respective offices.'' This gives no 
warrant for asking advice, for instance, from the Secretary 
of War upon a matter of finance ; but almost at once Wash- 
ington began to treat the group as one official family. When 
he was troubled as to the constitutionality of the Bank 
Bill (page 312), he asked both Hamilton and Jefferson for 
written opinions; and, in 1793, when the war between 
England and France raised serious questions as to the proper 
policy for America (page 321), he called the three Secretaries 
and Randolph into personal counsel in a body. This was 
the first "Cabinet meeting." ^ 

The Constitution made it the duty of Congress to pro- 
vide a Supreme Court. The "original jurisdiction" of that 
Court was stated in the Constitution ; but Congress ^j^^ 
was left at liherty to regulate the appellate jurisdic- Judiciary 
tion, and to provide inferior courts, or not, at its dis- ^* ° 
cretion. A Judiciary Act of 1789 established a system of which 
the main features still remain. (1) A Supreme Court (a Chief 
Justice and five Associate Justices) was created, to sit at the 
Capital ; (2) thirteen District Courts, each with a resident 

1 From time to time Congress has decreed new departments. In 1798 a Secre- 
tary of the Navy was given part of the duties of the old Department of War. The 
Post Office was established in 1790 as a part of the Treasury Department, but 
in 1829 the Postmaster General became the equal of the other heads of depart- 
ments. In 1849 there was added a Department of the Interior; and out of this 
were carved the Department of Agriculture, in 1889, and the Department of 
Commerce and Labor in 1903. The last was again divided in 1913 into the 
Department of Commerce and the Department of Labor. The Attorney General be- 
came the head of a Department of Justice in 1870. 



306 THE FEDERALIST PERIOD, 1788-1800 

judge, were established, covering the entire Union ; and (3) 
appeals to the Supreme Court were provided for, not only from 
inferior Federal courts, but also from any State court, in all 
cases ivhere such a court had denied any right or pouier claimed 
under a Federal law or treaty or under the Constitutio7i. 

This part of the law still makes the Federal judiciary 
the "final arbiter" between States and Nation. Con- 
gress might have given very narrow limits to the appellate 
power, but this great law extended that power so as to 
include every possible case of conflict between States 
and Nation. 

The establishment of the inferior Federal courts also 
greatly magnified the authority of the Federal judi- 
ciary at the expense of State courts, since it made 
Federal courts much more accessible than if there had 
been only one court, fixed at Washington. 

On the other hand, the power of the Supreme Court tvas soon 
limited hy an amendment to the Constitution. The first decision 
" Cbishoim to drawpublic attention to itsenormous powers was 
vs. Georgia" {^ ^j^g (.^se of Chisholm vs. Georgia, in 1793. Chis- 
holm, a citizen of South Carolina, sued to recover a debt from 
the State of Georgia. The Constitution states that "the 
judicial power shall extend ... to controversies between a 
State and citizens of another State." Georgia, however, 
claimed that this phrase meant only that a State could sue 
private citizens in the Federal Court, not that a State 
could itself be sued hy private individuals. The words 
must be taken in the light of the State-sovereignty ideas of 
that era; and, beyond all doubt, this understanding of 
Georgia was the general understanding when the Consti- 
tution was ratified. In the ratifying conventions, fear had 
been sometimes expressed that the clause might enable a 
private citizen to sue "a sovereign State." In all such cases, 
the leading Federalists explained that such meaning was 
impossible. Madison, in the Virginia convention, declared 
the objection "without reason," because "it is not in the 
power of individuals to call any State into court." In the 



THE JUDICIARY LIMITED BY AMENDMENT 807 

same debate, John Marshall (afterwards Chief Justice), in 
defending the clause, exclaimed : — 

" I hope no gentleman will think that a State will be called at 
the bar of a Federal Court. ... It is not natural to suppose 
that the sovereign 'power should be dragged before a court. The 
intent is to enable States to recover claims against individuals 
residing in other States." And Hamilton in the Federalist 
(No. 81) declared any other view " altogether forced and un- 
accountable," because " it is inherent in the nature of sovereignty 
not to be amenable to the suit of an individual without its own 
consent." 

Now, however, the Court, by a divided vote, assumed 
jurisdiction. Georgia refused to appear, and judgment 
went against her. Georgia thereupon threatened death 
"without benefit of clergy" to any Federal marshal who 
should attempt to collect the award. Civil war was im- 
minent. Similar suits were pending in other States, and 
there was widespread alarm. The legislatures of Massa- 
chusetts, Connecticut, and Virginia passed vigorous resolu- 
tions denouncing the Court's decision as "dangerous to the 
peace, safety, and independence of the several States." 
Then Congress by almost unanimous vote submitted to the 
States the Eleventh amendment, which was promptly 
ratified. This amendment reversed the decision of the Su- 
preme Court, and completely upheld Georgia's contention. 

By like action, even earlier, the people had sought to limit 
the powers of the Federal government by modifying the 
written document that defined those powers. In- The " Bill 
deed such limitation was essentially part of a bar- °^ Rights 
gain which had secured the ratification of the Constitution 
(page 296) . Seven of the ratifying State conventions had pro- 
posed amendments to the Constitution, 124 in number, and 
the more important ones the Federalist leaders had pledged 
themselves to secure. Accordingly, early in the first ses- 
sion of the first Congress, Madison introduced a list of twentj^ 
amendments. Twelve were adopted by Congress, and ten 
were ratified by the States. These are commonly known as 
" The Bill of Rights," and they supply a lack which had been 



308 THE FEDERALIST PERIOD, 1788-1800 

generally and vehemently criticized. They forbid Congress ^ 
to interfere with freedom of religion, freedom of the press, or 
freedom of petition, and they prohibit general warrants 
or excessive bail or crnel and unusual punishments. They 
further guarantee to citizens a right to trial by a jury of the 
neighborhood in criminal accusations and in civil cases 
when the amount in dispute exceeds twenty dollars. The 
Ninth and Tenth amendments emphasize the idea that the 
Federal government is limited to those powers enumerated 
in the Constitution. Recently the aftermath of the World 
War has given peculiar importance to the First amend- 
ment : " Congress shall make no law respecting an estab- 
lishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof ; 
or abridging freedom of speech, or of the 'press; or the right 
of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the govern- 
ment for a redress of grievances.^* 

n. HAMILTON'S FINANCE 

Congress made appropriations the first year amounting 
to $640,000 — about one hundredth as much per citizen as 
„ . , the cost of government in recent years, even before 

Getting the , -mr i i ^t i • • i i p i • 

new govern- the World War — and it provided tor this expense 
ment sub- \^y ^ /(^^^ tariff. The rates averaged about 7i per 

sistcncG -'A 

cent, and the bill was based upon the idea in the 
attempted "revenue amendments" of 1781 and 1783 (page 
269) . Pennsylvania members, however, secured some altera- 
tions intended to "protect" American manufactures, and 
this purpose was finally stated in the title of the bill. 
Strictly speaking, however, the law remained a tariff for 
revenue, with "incidental protective features." 

Meanwhile Hamilton, with marvelous skill and industry, 
had worked out a plan to care for the old debts and to put 
the chaotic finances of the nation in order. First he rec- 

^ These amendments were intended to restrict the Central government only, 
but many people think of the restrictions as applying to the States, also. Con- 
gress can give no religion preference over another; but a State legislature may do 
so, — unless forbidden by the State constitution. Some States did have "es- 
tablished churches" for many years longer. 



HAMILTON'S FINANCE 309 

ommended that the government "fund'''' the continental debt 
(both the $11,500,000 due abroad and the $40,500,000 of 
"certificates" held at liome), by taking it up, at Funding the 
face value, in exchange for new bonds payable in National 
fifteen and twenty years. (About a third of this ^ * 
domestic debt consisted of unpaid interest.) 

To make full provision for the foreign part of this debt 
was inevitable, if the United States was to have standing 
among the nations. Congress gave unanimous 
approval to this part of the scheme, but many over the 
members objected to taking over in full the old ^omestic 
domestic debt. For the most part, the "certifi- 
cates" had passed into the hands of speculators, at twelve 
or fifteen cents on the dollar; and, it was argued, there 
was neither necessity nor propriety in voting fortunes out 
of the people's money to men who had so traded on their 
country's needs. Nine Congressmen out of ten, at their 
election, had intended to scale down this debt. Hamil- 
ton maintained forcefully, however, that only full payment 
would establish national credit or redeem the faith pledged 
by the old Congress as the price of Independence ; and 
this view prevailed. On the other hand, the $200,000;- 
000 of Continental currency, held mainly by the common 
people instead of by profiteers, was practically repudiated. 
That currency was much the larger part of the Revolutionary 
debt. In view of this, the talk of "redeeming our sacred 
faith" has a peculiar sound. Hamilton's plan is to be 
praised because it was wise, not because it was particularly 
honest. 

Even before Hamilton's proposals were laid before Con- 
gress, his purpose leaked out ; and wealthy men in New York 
and Philadelphia hastily started agents in swift-sailing 
vessels for distant States, and on horseback for the back 
counties, to buy up certificates at the prevailing prices, 
before the news should arrive. Indeed, many believed that 
Hamilton himself was corruptly interested in this specula- 
tion. From this charge, happily, he can be absolutely ac- 
quitted ; but he had been careless in letting out official 



310 THE FEDERALIST PERIOD, 1788-1800 

secrets to less scrupulous friends, and some of his strongest 
supporters in Congress uiere among these " speculators." 

Hamilton planned also for the Federal government to 
assume the war debts of the States ($22,000,000) . This part 
Assumption ^^ ^^^'^ Scheme was long in danger. States that had 
of state already paid their debts resented bitterly the pros- 
® *^ pect of now having to help pay also the debts of 

other States ; and States-rights men denied the right of Con- 
gress to assume debts. The measure was finally carried by a 
log-rolling bargain, — one of several attempted by Hamilton 
for the purpose. Jefferson was persuaded to get two 
Virginia votes for "assumption," in return for Hamilton's 
promise of Northern votes to locate the Capital on the 
Potomac. Thus the total debt of the new nation was some 
74 millions — or about as much per head as the annual 
expenses of government a century later. (Several arrange- 
ments made it really less than this. Some of the domestic 
debt was paid in wild lands.) 

All this was vigorous financiering. American credit was 
established at a stroke. Confidence returned at home. 
Money came out of hiding, and we entered upon an era of 
business prosperity. As Daniel Webster afterward said, 
Hamilton "smote the rock of national resources, and abun- 
dant streams of revenue gushed forth. He touched the dead 
corpse of national credit, and it sj^rang upon its feet." 

But Hamilton's work was mo)'e than mere financiering. 

The great Secretary cared as much for the 'political results as 

for the -financial. He saw that these measures 

More than '' i i i «« pi • >> «i 

financier- would be a poweriul cement to union by 
ing : the arraying property on the side of the new govern- 

supportof X " T^ • 1 1 xi • X i? .• 

property ment. Jtispecially was tins true oi assumption. 
interests jf \\^r^i r>givt of the plan had failed, then all holders 

won 

of State bonds would have been inclined to oppose 
National taxation as a hindrance to State taxation — whereby 
they themselves would have had to be paid. After "as- 
sumption" carried, all such creditors were transformed into 
ardent advocates of the new government and of every ex- 
tension of its powers ; because the stronger it grew and 



THE WHISKY REBELLION 311 

the more it taxed, the safer their own private fortunes. 
The commercial forces of the country were consolidated behind 
the new goverjiment. Jefferson soon regretted bitterly his 
aid to this centralizing force, and complained that (just 
back from France) he had been tricked by Hamilton. 
"Hamilton's system," said he, "flowed from principles ad- 
verse to liberty, and was calculated to undermine the 
Republic," 

The victory of "assumption" made a larger revenue 
necessary. Another part of Hamilton's plan dealt with 
this need. In accord with his recommendations. New 
duties were increased slightly on goods imported *^^®^ 
from abroad; and, in 1791, Congress imposed a heavy ex- 
cise on spirits distilled at home. In that time, whisky, a 
universal drink, was manufactured in countless petty stills 
scattered over the country, especially in the poorer western 
countries, where the farmer could not market his grain in 
any other way. A pack horse could carry not more than 
four bushels of grain ; but, reduced to the form of whisky, 
he could carry twenty-four bushels. Western Pennsylvania 
is said to have had 3000 stills. 

These small producers in the western districts rarely 
saw much currency ; and they felt it a cruel hardship to 
have to pay the tax, particularly in advance of TheWhisky 
marketing the whisky. The legislatures of North RebeiUon 
Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania passed 
vehement resolutions condemning the law ; and in four 
western counties, of Pennsylvania the United States officials 
were driven out or set at naught for three years, — by 
methods that make a curious parody upon those used 
toward English oflScials in the years before the Battle of 
Lexington. This was the Whisky Rehellion, — the first re- 
bellion against the Federal government. Finally, under 
Hamilton's advice, Washington inarched 15,000 militia from 
neighboring States into the insurgent counties, and obedience 
was restored. Two leaders were tried for treason and con- 
demned to death, but they were pardoned by Washington. 



312 THE FEDERALIST PERIOD, 1788-1800 

The most important result of the whisky tax was not the 
increased revenue, but the demonstration that the new 
government was able and determined to enforce its laws. 

Hamilton also persuaded Congress to incorporate a 
National Bank. The government held part of the stock, and 
The first named some of the managing Board. In return, 
National the Bank acted as the agent of the government in 
securing loans, and took care of the national funds. 
There was a central bank at Philadelphia, with branches in 
other leading cities. Critics soon pointed out a danger that 
a bank connected with the government might exert tre- 
mendous political influence for the party in power by grant- 
ing or refusing loans. But banking facilities had been 
meager; and the convenience of this institution bound the 
commercial classes still more closely to the new government. 

The creation of the Bank led to the doctrine of "'implied 
powers'" in the Constitution (page 285). To create a cor- 
And poration is not among the powers "enumerated" 

"implied for Cougrcss. Indeed, efforts to include that 
powers particular power had been defeated in the Phila- 

delphia Convention. Hamilton, however, insisted that the 
authority was given by the "necessary and proper" clause. 
"Necessary," he urged, meant only "suitable"; and a 
national bank would be a suitable and convenient means to 
carry out the enumerated powers of borrowing money and 
caring for national finances. After serious hesitation, Wash- 
ington signed the bill. He had invited opinions from Jeffer- 
son as well as from Hamilton (page 305) ; and the debate be- 
tween the two great Secretaries began the dispute as to 
" strict construction " and "loose" or "broad" construction 
of the Constitution. 

m. NORTH AND SOUTH 

From the first, the serious contests under the neiv government 
were sectional. The conflicts upon assumption, the tariff, the 
Sectional Bank, had all been conflicts between North and 
disputes South, — commercial section and agricultural sec- 
tion. This sectionalism was intensified by the slavery ques- 



NORTH AND SOUTH 313 

tion. In the North, and as far south as through Virginia, 
antislavery sentiment was gradually growing. Some States 
had abolished slavery ; some were making arrangements for 
gradual emancipation ; others had at least forbidden importa- 
tion of slaves. In the first session of the First Congress, a 
Virginia representative moved a national tax of ten dollars a 
head upon all slaves imported into any State. After a bitter 
debate the matter was dropped. At the next session, two 
petitions were presented from Pennsylvania (cf. page 130) 
praying Congress to use its "constitutional powers" to 
limit slavery and protect the Negro. The residting debate 
was as fierce as any in our history, bristling with vitu- 
peration and with threats of secession; and the House 
finally adopted resolutions declaring that it had no "con- 
stitutional power" to interfere with the treatment of slaves, 
or to abolish slavery, within any State. The unquestion- 
able fact that it had power to regulate the treatment of 
slaves on the high seas and in the Territories it chose not 
to allude to. 

The next move came from the South in a demand for a 
Fugitive Slave Lau\ and in 1793 there was passed a dis- 
graceful statute. The Constitution sanctioned xhe first 
slavery and made it the legal duty of Congress Fugitive 
to provide the necessary machinery for the cap- *^® ^^ 
ture and return of fugitive slaves ; but the law should at 
least have given to any Negro, claimed as a slave, the 
benefit of the doubt, until proof of the claim was complete. 
The presumption should have been in his favor. Such, 
indeed, was the maxim of the Roman Imperial law. But 
this American law followed rather the medieval maxim 
that a masterless man must belong to some master. It 
was a base surrender of human rights to property rights. 
It assumed that the claim of a pretended master teas good 
unless disproved by evidence. No jury trial was provided, 
and a free Negro, seized in a strange locality, might easily 
find it impossible to prove his freedom, — especially as the 
law failed, to provide for summoning witnesses. A crushing 
fine was provided for any citizen aiding a Negro who might 



314 THE FEDERALIST PERIOD, 1788-1800 

prove to be an escaped slave. In every detail the presump^ 
tion of the law was against the Negro} 

The reunion of the old thirteen States was completed by 
the ratification of the Constitution in North Carolina (No- 
Expansion vember, 1789) and in Rhode Island (1790). Al- 
of the most at the same time began the expansion of the 

^°^ Union through the admission of new States, — 

Vermont in 1791, and Kentucky in 1792. Toward the 
close of the Federalist period, Tennessee was admitted 
(1796) ; and in 1802, early in the following period, Ohio 
came in. The admission of these new States brought into 
high relief the dangerous sectional division in the Union, but 
it also helped to set in motion two wholesome forces. 

Of the original thirteen States, seven were north of Mason 
and Dixon's line ; but some of these were still slave holding 
States, so that the Slave and Free sections were not unequal. 
The bills for the admission of Kentucky and Vermont were 
passed within a few days of each other, in order to main- 
tain the balance, — especially in the Senate, — between 
the forces for and against slavery. 

Both Kentucky and Vermont gave the franchise to all 
White males twenty-one years of age. These were the first 
And frontier States with "manhood franchise." Tennessee and 
democracy Qhio did not go quitc so far ; but they also were 
much more democratic than the older States. The admission 
of Western States began at once to introduce greater democ- 
racy into the Union. 

1 In a more enlightened age the courts would have held the law unconstitu- 
tional. It neither provided securities for the accused in criminal cases (if the 
claim that a Negro was an escaped slave constituted a criminal case), nor in- 
sured the jury trial guaranteed by the seventh amendment in ciril cases. But 
law, after all, is merely what the courts, sustained by public opinion, declare it 
to be. This abominable statute was sustained by American courts ; and, under 
its sanction, gangs of kidnapers could, and sometimes did, carry off free men to 
a horrible slavery. After some fifty years (in the famous Prigg v. Pennsylvania 
case) the Supreme Court of the nation definitely upheld the constitutionality of 
the law, except as to the provision requiring State officials to act as Federal officers 
in carrying if out (1842). The more active public opinion of the forties took ad- 
vantage of this leak to undermine the operation of the law. Then the Fugitive 
Slave Law of 1850 merely reenacted the old abuses with more efficient machinery; 
i. e. with special Federal commissit)ners to enforce them. 



THE FIRST NEW STATES 



315 



The new commonwealths had never known poHtical ex- 
istence as sovereign bodies. They were the children of the 
Union, created by it and fostered by it ; and the tendency 
to nationahty was stronger within their borders than within 
the original States. The most powerful single force in our 
history on the side of union has been this addition of the 
many new States carved out of the national domain. 







Paul Revere's Engraving of Harvard in 1770. 



CHAPTER XVII 

DECLINE OF THE FEDERALISTS 

I. RISE OF POLITICAL PARTIES 

The first three years of Washington's administration saw 

no poHtical parties. The adoption of the Constitution ended 

the first party contest. The Federahsts were left. 

The ele- ... 

ments for ahiiost without Opposition, to organize the govern- 
the rise of ment they had established, and, within a few 

parties it • i t • 

months, party lines were wiped out. It is some- 
times said that Washington tried to reconcile the two old 
parties and so appointed to his Cabinet two leaders from the 
Antifederalists, — Jefferson and Randolph. This is absurd. 
Jefferson had criticized the Constitution, — though less se- 
verely than Hamilton had, — but he, too, had used his in- 
fluence for its ratification. And, though Randolph refused 
to sign the final draft of the Constitution at Philadelphia, he 
had, afterward, in the Virginia convention, been one of the 
chief leaders for ratification. The Cabinet represented 
merely the different wings of the old Federalist party. 

But elements were present for new divisions. Men soon 
found themselves for or against the plans of the govern- 
ment according as they favored (1) aristocracy or democ- 
racy, (2) commercial or agricultural interests, (3) a strong 
or a weak government, and (4) English or French sym- 
pathies. 

And these divergent views arranged themselves in tuio groups. 
The commercial interests wished a strong central govern- 
Sectionai ment, and favored England because our commerce 
groupings -^^s mainly with that country.^ Likewise, they were 
more impelled toward aristocracy — to which they had always 

* After the Revolution almost as exclusively as before, — which suggests that 
the English navigation acts had not in great measure diverted colonial commerce 
from its natural channels. 

31G 



RISE OF POLITIC.\L PARTIES 317 

been inclined — because aristocratic England was now the 
champion of the old order against democratic France, in the 
wars of the French Revolution. On the other hand, the 
democratic portion of society had its chief strength in agri- 
cultural districts. It kept its Revolutionary hatred for 
England, and was warmly attached to France, formerly our 
ally and now the European champion of democracy. And, 
according to universal democratic feeling in that day, it 
looked with distrust upon any strong government. 

Unhappily, the new party lines were largely sectional. 
Commercial New England was mainly Federalist ; the agri- 
cultural South was Republican. Hamilton stood HamUton 
for the aristocratic, pro-English tendency ; Jeffer- and 
son, for the democratic, pro-French view. Soon the ^^ ^^^°^ 
two were contending in the Cabinet (in Jefferson's phrase) 
"like cocks in a pit." By 179'2 both had resigned, and these 
divergent views in the country had crystallized into new 
political parties. Jefferson believed that Hamilton's policy, 
if not checked, would result in monarchy ; and he called his 
own party "Republican." His opponents tried to discredit 
it by stigmatizing it "Democratic," and shrewdly took to 
themselves the old name "Federalist." 

Jefferson first uses the term Republican as a party 
name in a letter to Washington in May, 1792: "The 
Republican party among us, who wish to preserve . 
the government in its present form ..." Years publican" 
later he affirmed he had heard Hamilton call the ^^^^ °* 

1792 

Constitution "a shilly-shally thing, of mere milk 
and water, which . . . was good only as a step to some- 
thing better'' ; and later still he declared, "The contests of 
that day were contests of principle between the adherents 
of republican and of kingly government." 

But if Jefferson accused his opponents of plotting against 
the Republic, they, even more absurdly, accused him of 
plotting to overthrow all society, in the interest Party 
of bloody anarchy or at least of a general pro- bitterness 
scription of property (page 335). It took a generation 



318 THE FEDERALIST PERIOD 

for men to learn that political difference did not mean 
moral viciousness. Many years afterward, Madison char- 
acterized the party divisions more fairly: "Hamilton 
wished to administer the government into ivhat he thought 
it ought to be; while the Republicans wished to keep it as 
understood by the men who adopted it." 

Washington's patriotism so exalted him that the Repub- 
licans were unwilling to oppose his reelection. In 1793 he 
again received every electoral vote. Adams became Vice 
President again, by 77 votes to 50 for George Clinton. The 
Republicans were sadly handicapped in their canvass for 
Clinton by their lack of a candidate of their own for the 
presidency ; but they secured a strong majority in the new 
House of Representatives. 

Washington refused to be a candidate for a third term. 
Then, in 1796, came a true party contest. The Federalist 
" King members of Congress in caucus nominated Adams 

Caucus " and Thomas Pinckney. Republican Congressmen 
*" nominated Jefferson. Adams won by three votes. 

Jefferson became Vice President.^ 

These nominations in 1796 mark the first use of the 
Congressional caucus for nominating purposes, — a device 
that was to hold sway for the next thirty -five years ; but 
in New England town government the caucus was an old 
piece of political machinery. John Adams has left the earli- 
est account of it as it appeared in Boston (Diary for Feb- 
ruary, 1773) : — 

"This day I learned that the caucus club meets at certain times 
in the garret of Tom Dawes. . . . He has a large house, and he 
has a movable partition in his garret, which he takes down, and 
the whole club meets in one room. There they smoke tobacco 

' Before the Twelfth Amendment, each elector voted for two men without 
naming one for President, one for Vice President. If all Federalist electors had 
voted for both their candidates, there would have been no choice for first place. 
To prevent this result, several Federalist electors threw away their second votes, 
so that Pinckney, on the winning ticket, received fewer votes than Jefferson, on 
the other. The consequence was absurd, — President and Vice President from 
hostile parties. 



RISE OF POLITICAL PARTIES 319 

till you cannot see from one end of the room to the other. There 
they drink flip, I suppose, and there they choose a moderator, 
who puts questions to vote regularly ; and selectmen, assessors, 
collectors, firewards, and representatives are regularly chosen 
before they are chosen by the town." (It was his control over 
this caucus which made Samuel Adams for so long the "boss" of 
Boston.) 

By 1790, it had become customary in State legislatures for 
members of each party to "caucus" in order to nominate 
party candidates for State offices, and the device was now 
seized upon by the parties in Congress for national party 
nominations. Of course it destroyed at once and com- 
pletely the intention of the Constitution that the chosen 
electors should "deliberate" and make their own choice, 
and so "refine the popular will." It remained now only 
for them to follow the "recommendation" of the party 
caucus. This illustrates the fact that party government 
was a new thing. The men who made the Consti- p^j.^ 
tution did not foresee it. Those who dreamed of govem- 
it at all thought of it only as a dreaded possibility. ™®'^*°®'' 
The Constitution made no provision for the chief force which 
was to run it. But almost at once, for most useful purposes, 
the check of mutually balancing parties replaced the elaborate 
system of Constitutional checks devised by the Philadelphia 
Convention. 

Said John Adams, in October, 1792: "There is nothing 
which I dread so much as the division of the Republic into 
two great parties, each under its leader. . , . This, in my 
humble apprehension, is to be feared as the greatest politi- 
cal evil under our Constitution." Soon, however, all free 
peoples were to adopt the device as the only workable plan, 
so far invented, for self-government. This need not blind 
us to its imperfections. Government by party Mature of 
seems to be most wholesome when party lines cor- party 
respond in fair degree to the natural differences government 
between conservatives and progressives. One part of society 
sees most clearly the present good and the possible dangers in 



320 THE FEDER.\LIST PERIOD 

change, and feels that to maintain existing advantages is more 
important than to try for new ones. Another part sees most 
clearly the existing evils and the possible gain in change, and 
feels that to try to improve conditions, even at the risk of ex- 
periment, is more important than merely to preserve existing 
good. Each party draws its strength from some of the noblest 
and some of the basest of human qualities. The true reformer 
will find himself associated with reckless adventurers and 
self-seeking demagogues. The thoughtful conservative, 
struggling to preserve society from harmful revolution, will 
find much of his support in the inertia, selfishness, and 
stupidity of comfortable respectability, and in the greed of 
"special privilege." "Stupidity is naturally Tory"; and 
"Folly is naturally Liberal." ^ Over against this handicap 
stands one mighty advantage. One of the marks of true 
party government is moderation, because the shifting of only 
a small fraction of the total vote will usually displace the 
ruling party. 

II. FOREIGN RELATIONS, 1793-1800 

The French Revolution began one week after Washington 
became President, if it be dated in the usual way from the 
Foreign gathering of the States General. That tremendous 
troubles movement soon involved all Europe in war ; and 
the new-born American nation had only four years of quiet, to 
arrange its pressing affairs, before it was drawn into serious 
foreign complications. Those complications absorbed much 
American energy, and vitally affected American develop- 
ment for twenty-five years, and they were of particular 
interest during this Federalist period. 

At first popular sympathy went out enthusiastically to the 
French Republic in its desperate struggle against the "coalized 

• These lines are condensed roughly from a much longer passage in Lecky's 
England in the Eighteenth Century (1, 513-515). Colonel Higginson had the final 
quotation in mind probably, when he wrote of these first American political parties, 
"Some men became Federalists because they were high-minded; and some because 
they were narrow-minded ; while the more far-sighted and also the less scrupulous 
became Republicans." 



RELATIONS WITH FRANCE, 1792-1795 321 

despots " of Europe. From one end of America to the other, 
there burst forth a fine frenzy for "Democratic clubs" and 
other imitations of new French customs ; and Democratic 
loud demands were voiced that we return to sympathy 
France, in her need, the aid we had received from °^ '^^^^^ 
her in our own Revohition. Washington steadfastly with- 
stood this popular movement. On receiving news of war 
between France and England, in the spring of 1793, washing- 
he called the first Cabinet meeting (page 305), and, *P"^ 
with the unanimous approval of that body, de- Prociama- 
cided upon his famous ''Neutrality Proclamation." ^^°^" 

The President had no authority to fix the policy of the 
nation. That belongs to Congress. Accordingly, the proc- 
lamation did not say that the United States would re- 
main neutral. It did call the attention of our citizens 
to their duties while we were neutral, and it dwelt effec- 
tively upon the advantages of neutrality. It was really 
an impressive argument for that policy. For the moment, 
its chief result seemed to be a storm of violent abuse at 
Washington. 

The new French minister, "Citizen" Genet, tried to use 
our ports for French privateers as if America had been an 
ally of France in the war ; and, in such attempts " citizen " 
to embroil us with England, he had much popu- <^enet 
lar sympathy. Soon, however, Genet overreached himself. 
When checked by our government in his efforts to disregard 
our neutrality, he threatened to appeal from the government 
to the people. Washington promptly demanded that France 
recall its minister, and the people generally supported this 
defense of American dignity. 

Then public opinion began overwhelmingly to approve 
Washington's stately recommendation for neutrality in the 
great proclamation. That policy was established, by the 
informal mandate of the nation, and America was started upon 
a century-long period of separation from Old-World quarrels. 
In Washington's day such separation was especially whole- 
some, because we could then enter European politics only 
as tail to the French or English kite. 



322 THE FEDERALIST PERIOD 

Our troubles with England concerned the unfulfilled 
treaty of 1763 (page 235), our wish to trade with the British 
Relations West Indies — ^froni which England's navigation 
with acts now shut us out — and conflicting views of 

"^ ^" international law as to rights of neutral trade dur- 

ing the European war. The first two points were of merely 
temporary interest. Some things about the third matter are 
still vital. 

The English navy was trying to conquer France by shut- 
ting off foreign commerce. England looked upon our trade 
with France as an aid to the military resistance of that 
power. We regarded England's restrictions upon that trade 
as interference with neutral rights. Three of the points 
in dispute called for special notice. 

1. France began (May, 1793) seizing American ships 
bound to England with foodstuffs, on the ground that 
"Contra- such cavgo was " Contraband.''' England was soon 
band absolute mistress of the seas, and she gladly followed 
this example. She offered payment to the American owners, 
it is true, for the food she seized ; but we held that only 
military supplies were contraband.^ 

2. England captured neutral vessels bound even to an 
unblockaded port, if they carried goods belonging to citizens 
" Free of a Country with which she was at war. America 
ships" claimed, ''Free ships make free goods.'""- 

3. More serious, to our eyes to-day, was the seizure of 
American seamen, — though at the time it awoke far less 
Impress- protest than the scizure of property. England had 
^^^^ always recruited sailors for her men-of-war by the 
press gang ; and — so essential was the war navy — English 

• The Russian-Japanese War and still more the World War prove that this is 
still a vexed question. Food or elothing for an army, or for a besieged town, has 
always come under the head of military supplies. These recent wars show that 
whole provinces, and whole countries, may be "besieged," and that almost any 
sort of goods may become "military supplies." 

^ This maxim had been set up by Holland in 165Cr, and agreed to by northern 
European nations in 1780, except for England's opposition. War on land lias 
long recognized, in considerable degree, that private property should be taken 



RELATIONS WITH ENGLAND 323 

courts had always refused to interfere. Great numbers of 
British seamen had recently deserted to American merchant 
ships to get better wages and better treatment there. These 
deserters were often protected hy fraudulent papers of "citi- 
zenship," easily secured in American ports. English vessels 
claimed the right to search American ships and to take back 
such sailors. Soon the practice was extended to the impress- 
ment of other British subjects found there, and even to those 
who had been legally "naturalized" by American law.^ 
Worse still, in irritation at the American encouragement to 
their deserters, English officers sometimes impressed born 
Americans, either by mistake or by set purpose. 

Of course the " right of search " exists. In time of war, 
a war vessel of a belligerent may stop and search a neutral 
trading vessel to find out (1) whether it really is a neu- 
tral vessel as its flag proclaims ; (2) whether it is bound 
for any blockaded port; (3) whether it carries "contra- 
band." If "strong presumption" is found against the 
vessel on any of these points, it may be carried to a 
"prize court" for trial; and if there adjudged guilty, 
it becomes "lawful prize." But no "right of search" 
applies to seizing people; and the "right" must always 
be exercised with discretion and without unduly em- 
barrassing neutral trade. 

All England's invasions of neutral rights were attempted 
by other European belligerents, also ; but England's navy 
was the only one able to injure us seriously. As scores of 
American vessels with valuable cargoes were swept into 
British prize courts, American feeling rose to war heat. 
In the spring of 1794 Congress laid a temporary embargo 
upon all American shipping (that it might not be caught at 
sea, without warning, by the expected war), and threatened 

by a hostile army only as a necessary war measure, not merely for plunder. At 
sea, this civilizing doctrine has made slower progress, and piratical customs have 
continued. 

^ England denied the right of an Englishman to change his allegiance: "Once 
an Englishman, always an Englishman." The American contention of a man's 
right to change his citizenship by "naturalization" has prevailed. 



S24 THE FEDERALIST PERIOD 

to seize all moneys in America due British creditors, to off- 
set British seizures of American ships. This would have 
meant war. 

That disaster was averted only by the calm resolution of 
Washington. He appointed John Jay special envoy to 
The Jay negotiate with England ; and in November, 1794, 
Treaty "Ja?/'* Tfea^?/" was ready for ratification. By its 

terms, impressment was not mentioned or blockade defined. 
England had her way, too, as tocontraband and neutral ships ; 
but she agreed to vacate the Northwest posts, to open to 
American trade her West India ports under certain restric- 
tions, and to pay American citizens for recent seizures of ships 
and goods. The American government dropped the claim 
for compensation for the deported Negroes, and promised 
to pay the British creditors who had not been able to collect 
pre-Revolutionary debts. 

England offered to open the West India ports to 
American trade, but only to small coasting vessels, and 
upon condition that America promise for twelve years 
not to export to any part of the world molasses, sugar, 
coffee, cocoa, or cotton. The English intention, prob- 
ably, was simply to maintain her navigation system 
with regard to other countries, by making sure that 
American vessels, admitted to the Island ports, should 
not carry the products of those colonies to other parts 
of the world as well as to the United States, and that 
such products, after being brought to the United States, 
should not be reexported. Jay seems to have been 
ignorant that these restrictions (even that one regarding cotton) 
would hamper American commerce. The twelfth article 
of the treaty, containing this trade provision, was cut 
out by the Senate. 

It took all Washington's influence to get the treaty rati- 
fied. Excitement was intense. Jay was burned in effigy. 
Hamilton was stoned from a public platform where he ad- 
vocated ratification. Washington himself once more was 
heaped with vituperation. The Virginia legislature voted 



THE JAY TREATY OF 1794 325 

down a resolution expressing trust in her greatest son, and 
the national House of Representatives struck out the cus- 
tomary words " undiminished confidence''' from an address to 
him. 

The treaty certainly left much to be desired ; but at 
worst it was well worth while. America secured undisputed 
possession of her full territory and satisfaction for commer- 
cial injuries. For other matters, we gained what we needed 
most — time. To our new and unprepared nation, war 
at that moment would have been ruin. The treaty per- 
mitted an honorable escape. Moreover, in one respect it 
was a distinct step onward for civilization. It provided for 
the first instance of international arbitration in the modern 
sense. 

The treaty of 1783 had named the St. Croix River as the 
boundary of Maine from tlie sea to the highlands. But that 
unexplored region contained several rivers bearing inter- 
the name. The treaty-map, with its red-ink draw- national 
ings, had been lost. And several thousand square ^■■^^^'■^^°° 
miles of territory had fallen into honest dispute. This treaty 
of 1794 submitted the matter to adjudication by a commission 
(two men chosen by each power, they to have authority to 
choose a fifth). Each nation pledged itself in advance to 
abide by the award. The commission was to act as an inter- 
national court, with somewhat of judicial procedure. It was 
not to be merely a meeting of diplomats, to make a bargain 
or to seek out a compromise. It was to examine evidence 
and hear argument, and was sworn to do justice according 
to the real merits of the case, as an ordinary court decides 
title to property between private claimants. 

This rational agreement called forth violent outcry. In 
England, the ministry were assailed for "basely sacrificing 
British honor" ; and, on this side the water, there was much 
senseless clamor about "not surrendering American soil 
without first fighting to the last drop of our blood." To 
such silly, question-begging pretense of patriotism, Ham- 
ilton's reply was unanswerable: "It would be a horrid and 
destructive principle that nations could not terminate a 



326 THE FEDERALIST PERIOD 

dispute about a parcel of territory hy peaceful arbitration, 
but only by war," 

France had confidently expected these troubles to lead 
us into war with England, and she was bitterly angered 
jjg^ at the Jay Treaty. Her government, in a violent 

troubles protest, charged the United States with weakness 
with France ^^^ y^^^ faith, and insultingly refused to receive 
Pincknej^ who had been appointed our minister at Paris. 
Soon she withdrew her minister from America, and, to 
the full extent of her power, began aggressions upon our 
commerce. 

The administration of John Adams (1797-1801) found 
things at this pass ; and it was occupied almost wholly by 
this peril and by the disputes at home growing out of 
it. The President sent Gerry, Pinckney, and John Mar- 
shall to France to negotiate a settlement. The new French 
government (the Directory) first ignored these gentlemen, 
and then, through secret agents, tried to intimidate them and 
to demand tribute in money for private graft. 

The publication of this infamous "X. Y. Z."^ matter 
silenced the friends of France in America and fanned popular 
. , indignation to white heat. Pinckney's famous 

phrase, "Millions for defense, but not a cent for 
tribute," became the grim byword of the hour. Even the 
Southern States elected Federalist congressmen ; and, in 
1798, the Federalists once more gained possession for a 
moment of all branches of the government. 

In the summer of 1798, preparations for war with France 
were hastened. Warships were built, and the army was reor- 
Prepara- gauized. With Washington as commander in chief 
tions for and Hamilton as his second in command. War 
^" was not formally declared, but it did exist in fact. 

Scores of ships were commissioned as privateers, to prey upon 
French merchantmen ; and the United States frigate Con- 
stellation fought and captured the French Vengeance. 

' When Adams made public the dispatches of the American ministers, the names 
of the French negotiators were replaced by these initials. 



FRIES' REBELLION 327 

At this moment, in a roundabout way, the French gov- 
ernment hinted that it would be glad to renew negotiations. 
Adams had won great applause by a declaration, ^dams 
"I will never send another minister to France with- " keeps us 
out assurance that he will be received, respected, °"' °^ ^^"^ 
and honored as becomes the representative of a great, free, 
powerful, and independent nation." But now patriotically 
he threw away his popularity and the chance predomi- 
nance of his party, in order to save the country from war. 
Without even the knowledge of his Cabinet, he appointed 
another embassy ; and the treaty of 1800 secured our trade, 
for the time, from further French aggression. Adams' cour- 
age in this matter is perhaps his highest claim to grateful 
remembrance. He himself proposed for his epitaph, "Here 
lies John Adams, who took upon himself the responsibility 
for the peace with France in 1800." 

Midway in the turmoil with France and England, we 
nearly came to blows with another power. The origin of 
our disputes with Spain has been treated in earlier 
chapters. In 1795, after vigorous negotiation pinckney 
backed at last by threat of war, the Pinckney ^f®,**^ . 
Treaty secured a fairly satisfactory adjustment — 
on paper. Spain bound herself to restrain Indian raids from 
her territory, promised "right of deposit" (page 247) at 
New Orleans, and paid for previous seizures there. 

in. DOMESTIC TROUBLES, 1797-1800 

The preparation for war, at the opening of Adams' ad- 
ministration, made more revenue necessary. Congress 
raised the tariff rates, passed a Stamp Act, and apportioned 
a "direct tax" of $2,000,000 among the States. 

This last measure resulted in Fries' Rebellion'. In assess- 
ing the new tax, houses were valued according to their size 
and the number of their windows. Officers were Fries' 
frequently resisted in their attempts to measure Rebellion 
houses, and slops were sometimes poured upon their heads 
from the windows. In Pennsylvania a number of the rioters 



328 JOHN ADAMS' ADMINISTRATION 

were arrested. They were promptly rescued by armed men 
led by a certain Fries. Adams thought it necessary to call 
out an army to repress the "insurrection." Fries was con- 
demned to be hung for treason, but was pardoned by the 
President, — to the indignation of leading Federalists, who 
clamored for an "example," as Adams himself had done 
when Washington pardoned the leaders of the Whisky 
Rebellion. 

Political controversy had grown excessively bitter. Re- 
publican editors poured forth upon the President and his 
administration abuse which in our better-mannered era 
would be regarded as blackguardism. The Federalists 
retorted with language equally foul, and tried to gag their 
opponents with the notorious ''alien arid sedition" laws, — 
repressive, tyrannical, dangerous to the spirit of free in- 
stitutions. 

Aliens had been required to live in the United States five 
years before they could be naturalized : a new Naturaliza- 
The Alien ^'^^' ^^^ raised this period to fourteen years. An 
and Sedition Alien law authorized the President, without trial, 
^^^^ to order out of the country "any aliens he shall 

judge dangerous to the peace and safety of the United 
States," and, if they remained, to imprison them "so long 
as, in the opinion of the President, the public safety may re- 
quire." The Sedition law provided fine and imprisonment 
for "combining" to oppose measures of the government, and 
for "any false, scandalous, or malicious writing against the 
government" or against its high officials, " with intent to bring 
them into disrepute." 

Seditious utterance and slander were already punishable 
in State courts, under the Common Law. But, since the 
Zenger trial, prosecutions of this sort for political utterances 
had become obsolete in America. The people, with sound 
instinct, had preferred to endure some bad manners, rather 
than to imperil liberty. This reenactment of obsolete 
practice by a National law, to be enforced in the govern- 
ment's own courts, conflicted, in spirit at least, with the First 
amendment. Says Francis A. Walker: "The blunder of 



VIRGINIA AND KENTUCKY RESOLUTIONS 329 

the Federalists was not accidental. ... It was thoroughly 
characteristic. It sprang out of a distrust of the masses; 
a belief that the people must always be repressed or led ; 
... a readiness to use force ; — all of which were of the 
essence of the aristocratic politics of the last quarter of 
the eighteenth century." 

President Adams took no part in securing these laws ; and 
he made no use of the Alien Act. But Federalist judges 
showed a sinister disposition to stifle criticism of Federalist 
their political party by securing convictions under intolerance 
the Sedition law. Matthew Lyon, a Vermont editor, charged 
Adams with "unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp and for 
foolish adulation" and with "selfish avarice." For these 
words, he was punished by imprisonment for four months and 
by a fine of $1000. Nine other convictions followed in the 
few months remaining of Federalist rule, and like cases oc- 
curred in State courts under Federalist control. One grand 
jury indicted a man for circulating a petition for the repeal 
of the Sedition law ! 

In great excitement, Jefferson wrote to George Mason 
{Works, Washington ed., IV, 257) : "I consider those laws 
only an experiment on the American mind to see And Re- 
how far it will bear an avowed violation of the P^Wican 

su£f Question 

Constitution. If this goes down, we shall see of Nuiufica- 
attempted another act of Congress declaring that *'°" 
the President shall continue in office during life, reserving 
to another occasion the transfer of the succession to his heirs 
and the establishment of the Senate for life. That these 
things are in contemplation, I have no doubt." For pro- 
tection the Republicans turned to the State governments. 
The Federalists, drunk with power, had threatened tyranny : 
the Republicans, in panic, sought refuge in the doctrine of 
State sovereignty. Multitudes of popular meetings de- 
nounced the Alien and Sedition laws; and the Republica?! 
legislatures of Virginia and Kentucky suggested Nidlifica- 
tion as a remedy, though with no clear statements as to 
how that remedy should be applied. Jefferson wrote the 
first draft of the resolutions for Kentucky ; Madison, for 



330 JOHN ADAMS' ADMINISTRATION 

Virginia, in somewhat gentler form. Indeed the first set 
of Kentucky Resolutions, in 1798, did not contain the word 
Nullification, though it was used in debate, but it appeared 
explicitly in a second set, in 1799. The leaders seem, how- 
ever, to have had in mind only a suspension of the law 
pending a referendum to the States. 

The war frenzy of 1798-1799 had momentarily put the 
Federalists in control of most of the State legislatures. 
This explains why the Southern States in general made no 
response to the Virginia and Kentucky appeals. Several 
Northern legislatures condemned those Resolutions severely, 
— denying the Kentucky doctrine that there was "no 
common judge" between a State and the Union, and affirm- 
ing that the Supreme Court filled that position. But 
in that day, the Kentucky doctrine that there was 
"no common judge" was not surprising. The Supreme 
Court itself had not yet used the power to pass upon the 
constitutionality of the Acts of Congress. It had not even 
claimed that right, and was not to do so for some more years ; 
and a few years later the New England States, that now 
asserted its power, denied it fiercely — in the precise words 
of the Kentucky Resolutions (page 388 ff.). 

It is well, however, at this stage, to point out that nullifica- 
tion, whether of Jefferson's brand in 1798, or New England's 
in 1814, or Calhoun's in 1830, was absurd in logic and would 
have been anarchic in practice. Any group of citizens or 
of States which feels itself sufficiently oppressed, has the 
natural right to rebel, and to change the government by 
revolution, if it can, — as America did in 1776. The right 
of revolution is the fundamental guarantee for liberty in 
organized society. The question regarding it is never one 
of abstract right but always of concrete righteousness under 
given conditions. In result, too, revolution means either 
that the government will be confirmed, or that another 
government will be substituted for it. But nullification 
meant a constitutional right to reduce the government to a 
shadow while claiming its protection. 



EXPIRING FEDERALISM 331 

IV. EXPIRING FEDERALISM 

The Federalist leaders had fallen into foolish blunders 
(like the house tax) because they did not understand popular 
feeling ; and they had attempted reactionary and „ , ,. 

, ^.' /Ti 1 o I- • A \ 1 Federalism 

despotic measures (like the Sedition Act) because out of touch 
they did not believe in popular government. They ^'^^ Ameri- 
were out of touch with the most wholesome tend- 
ency of the times. The brief reactionary movement of 
1783-1793 was dying, and the people had resumed their 
march toward democracy. Patriotism had temporarily 
rallied the nation to the support of the Federalist adminis- 
tration when that administration had been insulted by the 
arrogant French Directory ; but with the passing of that 
foreign danger, passed also the chance of further Federalist 
rule. 

For the election in 1800, the Federalists tried to bolster 
their cause by inducing Washington to be a candidate once 
more. Weary and discouraged, Washington re- The election 
fused, affirming that his candidacy would not draw °^ ^^°° 
a vote from the anti-Federalists. This refusal, followed by 
Washington's sudden death, threw the Federalists back upon 
Adams, whose old Revolutionary popularity made him still 
their most available man. The Republican candidates were 
Jefferson and Burr (the latter a sharp New York politician). 

Lacking true majorities the Federalists strove to manufac- 
ture false ones. The electoral vote finally stood only 73 to 65 
against them ; but 20 of their 65 electors they got Federalist 
by disreputable trickery, against the will of the sharp 
people. Of several instances, only one can be told p''^'^'*'^^ 
here. In Pennsylvania the new House of Representatives was 
strongly Republican ; but hold-over members, from the war- 
election, kept the Senate Federalist.^ So far, that State had 
always chosen its electors by popular vote. This time the 
Senate would not agree to the necessary law (since that 
method would give most of the districts to the Republicans). 

^ In a new constitution, in 1790, Pennsylvania had exchanged its one-House 
legislature for the prevalent two-chambered system. 



332 EXPIRING FEDERALISM 

There being no law on the matter, it was then necessary for 
the legislature itself to choose electors. All elections by that 
body had been by joint ballot, but the Senate now insisted 
upon a concurrent vote. It finally compromised upon a 
scheme which allowed it to name seven of the fifteen elec- 
tors. This shabby trick — a deliberate violation of a popular 
mandate — was loudly applauded by the Federalists as 
lofty patriotism. The Philadelphia United States Gazette 
said of the Federalist Senators : " [They] deserve the praises 
and blessings of all America. They have checked the mad 
enthusiasm of a deluded populace. . . . They have saved 
a falling world.''' 

When it was plain that the people had turned the Federal- 
ists out of all the elective branches of the government, 
the expiring and repudiated Congress and President used 
the few days left them unscrupulously to entrench their 
party in the appointive Judiciary, — "that part of the 
government upon which all the rest hinges." 

The infamous Judiciary Act of 1801 had three main parts. 
(1) To lessen Jefferson's chances of making appointments to 
The ^^^ Supreme Court it provided that the first va- 

judiciary cancy sliould not be filled, but that the number 
^^° of Justices should at that future time be reduced 

by one. (2) Circuit courts were created, with a distinct 
body of judges, and the number of circuits was increased 
to six, with three judges for each except the last. This made 
places for sixteen new judges, to be immediately appointed 
by Adains in the remaining nineteen days of his administra- 
tion. (3) The number of District courts was increased 
from thirteen to twenty -three, making places for eight more 
such appointments. In addition, of course, there were 
clerks and marshals to be named for all these new courts. 

The law of 1789 had created three circuits, but had 
arranged for courts consisting of Justices of the Supreme 
Court " on circuit," aided by some District judge. The 
Federalists justified the new bill flimsily by urging the need 
of the separate Circuit courts to protect the "overworked" 



"MIDNIGHT JUDGES ■ 333 

Supreme Court Justices. But, in plain fact, the Supreme 
Court had never been overworked. It had then only ten 
cases before it, and, in the preceding ten years of its life, 
it had had fewer cases than are customary in one year now. 
The weakness of the Federalist argument appears in the fact 
that the bill tvas repealed at once (page 358) and the old order 
restored and maintained seventy years longer. 

Adams was not able to make his last appointments under 
the new law until late on the last evening of his term of 
office ; and the judges so appointed have gone in ^j^^ .. ^^^_ 
history by the name of "the Midnight Judges." night 
One of the worst features of a thoroughly bad ^^^ 
business was that these appointments were used to take care 
of Federalist politicians now thrown out of any other job. 
The people at the polls had repudiated certain men for gov- 
ernment positions ; but President Adams, the people's rep- 
resentative, thought it proper to place those men in more 
important government positions for life, where the people 
could not touch them. Such a practice is repugnant to 
every principle of representative government. The Consti- 
tution prevented the appointment of members of the ex- 
piring Congress to any of the new judgeships just created 
by them (Art. I, sec. 6) ; but this provision was evaded with 
as little compunction as went to thwarting the will of the 
people. Former District judges were promoted to the new 
Circuit judgeships, and their former places were filled by 
"retired" Federalist congressmen. The Federalists, ex- 
claimed John Randolph, of Virginia, had turned the 
judiciary into "a hospital for decayed politicians." 

The desperate Federalists tried also to rob the majority of 
its choice for the Presidency. This led almost to civil war. 
Jefferson and Burr had received the same electoral ^, , ^. 

-P^ T-» ii- !!• iiTfv ^"^® election 

vote, iiivery Republican had mtended Jeiierson in the House 
for President and Burr for second place ; but, under of Repre- 

S6ntd.tlV6S 

the clumsy provision of the Constitution (page 318) 

the election between these two was now left to the old House 

of Representatives, in which the Federalists had their ex- 



334 EXPIRING FEDERALISM 

piring war majority.^ Accordingly the Federalists planned 
to create a deadlock and prevent any election until a,fter 
March 4. Then they could declare government at a stand- 
still and elect the presiding officer of the old Senate as 
President of the country. Jefferson wrote at the time that 
they were kept from this attempt only by definite threats 
that it would be the signal for the Middle States to arm 
and call a convention to revise the Constitution. 

The Federalists then tried another trick which would 
equally have cheated the nation of its will. The House of 
Representatives had the legal right to choose Burr for Presi- 
dent, instead of Jefferson. It seemed bent upon doing so; 
but Hamilton rendered his last great service to his country 
by opposing and preventing such action.^ So, after a delay 
of five weeks, and thirty-six ballotings, the House chose 
Jefferson President. Early in the next Congress the Twelfth 
amendment was proposed and ratified, for naming President 
and Vice President separately on the electoral ballots. 

The fatal fault of the Federalist leaders was their funda- 
mental disbelief in popular government. After Jefferson's 
Federalist victory, in 1800, this feeling found violent expres- 
disbeiief in sion. Fislicr Ames, a Boston idol, declared : 
emocracy " Q^j. country is too big for union, too sordid for 
patriotism, too democratic for liberty. . . . Its vice will gov- 
ern it. . . . This is ordained for democracies." Cabot, 
another Massachusetts leader, affirmed, "We are demo- 
cratic altogether, and I hold democracy, in its natural 
operation, to be the government of the worst." And 
Hamilton is reported to have ' exclaimed, pounding the 
table with clenched fist: "The people, sir! Your peo- 
ple is a great beast." Dennie's Portfolio, the chief liter- 
ary publication of the time, railed at greater length : 

' The new House, elected some months before, but not to meet for nearly a 
year longer, was overwhelmingly Republican ; but, by our awkward arrangement, 
the repudiated party remained in control at a critical moment. 

- Hamilton, does not seem to have felt the enormity of the proposed violation 
of the nation's will ; but he knew Burr to be a reckless political adventurer, and 
thought his election more dangerous to the country than even the dreaded election 
of Jefferson. 



DISBELIEF IN DEMOCRACY 



335 



"Democracy ... is on trial here, and the issue will be 
civil war, desolation, and anarchy. No wise man but dis- 
cerns its imperfections ; no good man but shudders at its 
miseries ; no honest man but proclaims its fraud ; and no 
brave man but draws his sword against its force." And 
Theodore Dwight of Connecticut (brother of the President 
of Yale College), in a Fourth of July oration, declaimed : — 

"The great object of Jacobinism ^ ... is to destroy every 
trace of civilization in the world, and force mankind back into a 
savage state. ... We have a country governed by blockheads 
and knaves ; the ties of 
marriage are severed and 
destroyed ; our wives and 
daughters are thrown into 
the stews ; our children are 
cast into the world from 
the breast and forgotten ; 
filial piety is extinguished ; 
and our surnames, the only 
mark of distinctioif among 
families, are abolished. 
Can the imagination paint 
anything more dreadful on 
this side hell ? " 

It was but a step from 
such twaddle to sus- 
pect Jefferson of plot- 
ting against the property 
or the life of Federalist 
leaders. In Gouverneur 
Morris' diary for 1804 
we find the passage : 

"Wednesday, January 18, I dined at [Rufus] King's with 
General Hamilton. . . . They were both alarmed at the 
conduct of our rulers, and think the Constitution about to 
be overthrown : I think it already overthrown. They 

' A term borrowed from the French Revolution, and applied to the Repub- 
licans by their opponents, much as "Bolshevist" has been used in recent years. 




Alexander Hamilton. From the Trumbull 
portrait, in the Yale School of Fine Arts. 



336 END OF THE FEDERALIST PERIOD 

apprehend a bloody anarchy : I apprehend an anarchy in 
which property, not Hves, will be sacrificed." And Fisher 
Ames wrote: "My health is good for nothing, but ... if 
the Jacobins make haste, I may yet live to be hanged." In 
1804, in a Connecticut town, an applauded Fourth of July 
toast to "The President of the United States" ran — 
"Thomas Jefferson : may he receive from his fellow citizens 
the reward of his merit — a halter!'''' (And see page 386.) 

These faults must not obscure the vast service the Federal- 
ists had rendered. Alexander Hamilton is the hero of the 
twelve-year Federalist period. He should be 

The gains . , , . , , , ^ , . , . , 

in the judged m the mam by his work m the years 

^^rlod^"^* 1789-1798. During that critical era, he stood 
forth — as no other man of the day could have 
done — as statesman-general in the conflict between order 
and anarchy, union and disunion. His constructive work 
and his genius for organization were then as indispensable 
to his country as Jefferson's democratic faith and inspira- 
tion were to be later. Except for Hamillon, there would 
hardly have been a Nation for Jefferson to Americanize. 
We may rejoice that Hamilton did not have his whole 
will ; but we must recognize that the forces he set in 
motion made the Union none too strong to withstand the 
trials of the years that followed. 

Those centralizing forces may be summarized concisely. 
The tremendous support of capital was secured for almost 
any claim the government might make to doubtful powers. 
Congress set the example of exercising doubtful and un- 
enumerated powers ; and a cover was devised for such 
practice in the doctrine of implied powers. The appellate 
jurisdiction conferred on the Supreme Court was to enable 
it to defend and extend this doctrine. Congress began to 
add new States, with greater dependence of feeling upon 
the National government. And the people at large began 
to feel a new dignity and many material gains from a 
strong Union. 



PAET VI— JEFFEESONIAN REPUBLICANISM 1800-1830 
CHAPTER XVIII 

AMERICA IN 1800 

From Jefferson to Lincoln, six great lines of growth mark 
American history : its territory expa?ided tremendously ; the 
Americans won intellectual independence from Old Ljj^^g ^^ 
World opinion ; democracy spread and deepened ; growth. 
the industrial system grew vastly complex; slavery ^^° 

2vas abolished; and Nationalism triumphed over disunion. 
The first of these, territorial growth, was the warp through 
which ran the other threads of growth. The ex- Territorial 
pansion of civilization into waste spaces marked expansion 
world history in the nineteenth century. England and 
Russia led in the movement ; but not even for them was 
this growth so much the soul of things as it was for us. 

It made us truly American. Our tidewater communities 
remained "colonial" in feeling long after they became inde- 
pendent politically, — still hanging timorously on Old- 
World approval. Only when our people had climbed the 
mountain crests and turned their faces in earnest to the 
great West, did they cease to look to Europe for standards 
of thought. 

It made us democratic. The communities progressive in 
politics have always been the frontier parts of the country, 
— first the western sections of the original States, and then 
successive layers of new States. 

It created our complex industrialism, with the dependence 
of one section upon another ; and so it brought on our conflict 
between slave and free labor. 

It fostered nationality. Europe is convex toward the sky. 
Mountains and seas form many walls and moats ; and rivers 

337 



338 THE AMERICA OF 1800 

disperse from the center toward the extremities. And 
so fourteen nations there divide an area smaller than the 
Mississippi valley. America is a "vast concave." Its 
mountains guard the frontiers only. Its streams concen- 
trate, and so tend to unity industrial and political. The 
original thirteen States, scattered amid the forests and 
marshes of the Atlantic slope, long clung to their jealous, 
separatist tendencies. But expansion into the Mississippi 
valley, wrought out by nature for the home of one mighty 
industrial empire, transformed that handful of jangling 
communities into a continental nation. 

Throughout the nineteenth century, Americans exulted in 
their country's growth. Sometimes, it is true, this exulta- 
And ^^^^^ expressed itself clumsily, as cheap spread- 

American eagleism or insolent jingoism ; and well-meaning 
ea ism critics, more refined than robust, saw in the buoy- 
ant self-confidence of the people only vulgar and grotesque 
boastfulness about material bigness. For a time, American 
ideals were to become sordid, in a measure ; but not until 
the last quarter of the century, when commercialism had re- 
placed romance as the dominant note in our life. Through 
all the earlier period the plain people felt a truth that the 
cultured critic missed. They knew that this growth was 
not mere growth. For the creation of the nation, and for 
its proper life, the conquest of our proper territory from 
savage man and savage nature was first needful ; and this 
Titanic conflict with a continent became idealized to the 
heart and imagination of a hardy race. This was the hun- 
dred year American epic — its protagonist the tall, sinewy, 
saturnine frontiersman with his long rifle and well-poised 
ax, and usually with his Bible, encamped in the wilderness 
to win a home for his children and for a nation. First 
among American writers, Lowell fixed that poem in words, 
— and happily in the dialect of the original frontiersman : — 

"O strange New World ! That never yit wast young; 
Whose youth from thee by grippin' need was wrung ; 
Brown foundlin' o' the woods, whose baby-bed 
Was prowled roun' by the Injun's cracklin' tread. 



PHYSICAL ADVANTAGES 339 

And who grewst strong thru shifts, and wants, and pains, 

Nursed by stern men with empires in their brains, 

Who saw in vision their young Ishmael strain 

In each hard hand a vassal Ocean's mane ! 

Thou taught by freedom, and by great events. 

To pitch new States as Old- World men pitch tents ! " 

This larger America had marvelous physical advantages. 
For comimunication with the outside world, the two oceans 
and the Gulf give to the United States a coast line physical 
equaled only by Europe's. Rivers and the shore of advantages 
the Great Lakes add 19,000 miles of navigable interior water- 
ways, — a condition absolutely beyond parallel in any other 
equal portion of the globe. More than four fifths of these 
water roads are grouped in the Lake system and the Missis- 
sippi system. These are virtually one vast system, opening on 
the sea on two sides and draining more than a million square 
miles of territory — giving to cities a thousand miles inland 
the advantages of seacoast ports, and binding together, 
for instance, Pittsburg and Kansas City, on opposite slopes 
of the great valley a thousand miles across. 

Above the limit of navigation, these streams, and others, 
furnish an unrivaled water power. Many years ago, Pro- 
fessor Shaler estimated that the energy already derived 
from the streams of this country exceeded that from the 
streams of all the rest of the world. This power was of 
particular importance in colonial days. Then, for a hun- 
dred years, it lost value, relatively, after the invention of 
steam. But now, with new devices to turn it into electric 
power, it looms again a chief factor in future wealth. 

The Appalachian region contains rich deposits of coal 
and iron in close neighborhood ; while the Great Lakes make 
communication easy between Appalachian coal and Lake 
Superior iron. Other mineral deposits needful in industry 
exist in abundance, well distributed over the country, — 
copper, lead, zinc, building stone, gold and silver, salt, 
phosphates, clays, cements, graphite, grindstones, and a 
small amount of aluminum. In 1800, great forests still 
stretched from the Atlantic to Illinois, western Kentucky, 



340 



THE AMERICA OF 1800 




PHYSICAL ADVANTAGES 341 

and northern Minnesota ; and the vast woods of the Pacific 
slope were soon to become American. 

It is only fair to note two physical conditions which held 
less of promise. 

1. A sectional elevation on page 342 shows that the 
meridian 100 cuts the country into fairly equal but very 




California Redwood Trees. 

different halves. The eastern half is essentially of one 
character, and was easily made one section as to communi- 
cation by railroads and canals. Neither fact ^^^ 
holds good for the western half. That vast re- adverse 
gion contains, in succession (to quote Dr. Draper), *^°'^*^'*^°°^ 
"an arid, sandy district, the soil saline and sterile; an enor- 
mous belt of elevated land without an equivalent in Europe, 
the eastern side a desert, the western Asiatic in character; 
and, on the rapid Pacific incline, the moist, genial atmosphere 
of Great Britain and Spain ; — a series of zones with all 
the contrasts of nature. . . . The imperial Republic has 
a Persia, an India, a Palestine, a Tartary of its own." 



342 



THE AMERICA OF 1800 



These diverse zones I'roiii east to west had Kttle oppor- 
tunity, however, to operate in hostility to political union. 
The American people did not come under their influence at 
all until just before the great Civil War. The question of 
Union or Disunion teas settled for generations to come by 
men reared under the influence of the uniform eastern half of 
the continent. 

2. The lines of 22 and 41 degrees Fahrenheit, for January, 
may be taken as convenient bounds for the true "temperate" 
zone (map, page 2). By those, or any other suitable lines of 
equal temperature, the climatic temperate zone in North 
America (in the interior as on the coast) is far narrower than 



100 West from Greenwich 




Sectional Elevation of the United States in Latitude 40° North. (After 
Draper- Elevations magnified.) 

y-o, sea level ; o, Appalachian crest ; b, Mississippi ; c, beginning of saline plains ; d—e. Great 
Salt Lake region ; e-f, great elevated basin ; /, Coast range ; o-c, Atlantic section ; c-p. Pacific 
section. 

The slope bd is more than 1000 miles long, up to the mountain passes, which are about 10,000 
feet above the sea (with peaks rising 4000 or 4300 feet higher.) The true rise, therefore, is less 
than 10 feet to a mile. 

in Europe. Its width in Europe is one of the causes for 
that continent's becoming the earliest home of true civi- 
lization. Its narrowness in America is in itself a condition 
unfavorable to progress ; but this influence was minimized 
by the late date of settlement and the advanced civilization 
of the early settlers. 

Population had doubled since the Revolution opened, and 
in 1800 it counted 5,308,483, or more than a third the 
population of the British Isles at that time. Of 
the total, a fifth were slaves. Two thirds of the 
Whites were north of Mason and Dixon's line, 
and nine tenths of the whole population dwelt 
east of the mountains. The land was untamed, — forests 



Population 
and its dis- 
tribution 
in 1800 



THE WESTWARD MARCH 



343 



hardly touched, and minerals undisturbed. Even in the 
coast district, settlement had only spotted the primeval 
wilderness ; and rough fishing hamlets marked havens 
where now bristle innumerable masts and smokestacks. 
The great bulk of the people lived in little agricultural 
villages or in the outlying cabin farms. Less than one 
twentieth were "urban.'''' By the first census (1790), only 
six towns had six thousand people : Philadelphia, 4'2,500 ; 
New York, 32,000; Boston, 18,000; Charleston, 16,000; 
Baltimore, 14,000; and Providence, 6000. By 1800 
these figures had risen to 70,000, 60,000, 24,000, 20,000, 
26,000, and 8000. The first three cities had begun to pave 




Movement of Centers of Population (O) and Manufactures (+). The 
Census Bureau did not determine the center of manufactures for 1910. 

their streets with cobblestones, to light them with dimly 
flaring lamps, and to bring in wholesome drinking water 
in wooden pipes ; but police systems and fire protection 
hardly existed, and the complete absence of sewers resulted 
in incessant fevers and plagues. Washington was a village 
of contractors and workmen, living in sheds and boarding 
houses. 

The westward march of our population had barely begun. 
In 1800 the "center of population" was eighteen miles west 
of Baltimore. Ten years before, it had been forty- The west- 
one miles farther east. The half million people west ^^""^ march 
of the mountains dwelt still in four or five isolated groups, 
all included in a broad, irregular wedge of territory with its 



344 THE AMERICA OF 1800 

apex reaching not quite to the Mississippi (map, facing page 
258). The greater part of our own half of the vast valley 
was yet unknown even to the frontiersman. In his in- 
augural, Jefferson, enthusiast that he was regarding his 
country's future, asserted that we then had "room enough 
for our descendants to the hundredth and even thousandth 
generation." Before his next inaugural, he was to double 
that territory. 

Communication remained much as before the Revolution. 
The States had little more intercourse with one another, as 
Communi- yet, than the colonies had enjoyed. The lowest 
cation letter postage was eight cents : from New York to 

Boston it was twenty cents. In 1790 there were only 75 post 
offices in the country — for a territory and population which 
under modern conditions would have some 6000. A traveler 
could jolt by clumsy and cramped stagecoach, at four miles 
an hour, from Boston to New York in three days, and on to 
Philadelphia in two days more — longer than it now takes 
to go from Boston to San Francisco. Such travel, too, 
cost from three to four times as much as modern travel by 
rail. South of the Potomac, traveling was possible only 
on horseback — with frequent embarrassments from absence 
of bridges or ferries. Between 1790 and 1800, a few canals 
were constructed, and attention was turning to the possi- 
bilities in that means of communication. Freights by land 
averaged, it is computed, ten cents a mile per ton, even in 
the settled areas, — or eight times the rates our railroads 
charge. Merely to move sugar from the coast to any point 
300 miles inland cost more than sugar sold for anywhere in 
the country before the World War. 

Occupations had changed little since 1775 (pages 159 ff.). 
The year after the peace with England saw the first American 
. voyage to China ; and shipmasters began at once 
to reach out for the attractive profits of that Ori- 
ental trade. The European wars were favoring our carrying 
trade with the Old World. John Jacob Astor was organizing 
the great American Fur Company, to follow the furs into 
the far Northwest. Manufactures were making a little prog- 



OCCUPATIONS AND WAGES 



345 



ress. A few iron mills were at work ; and, between 1790 and 
1812, some of the machinery recently invented in England 
for spinning and weaving cotton was introduced. In Eng- 
land, by 1800, such machinery had worked an "Industrial 
Revolution" ; but it did not come into use extensively here 
until the War of 1812 forced us to manufacture our own 
textiles. 

For America the chief result of the Industrial Revolu- 
tion at this time was England's increased demand for raw 
cotton for her new factories. Cotton had been " cotton is 
costly because the seed had always had to be King" 
separated from the fiber by hand. But in 1793 Eli Whitney, 




An Early Cotton Gin. 

a Connecticut schoolmaster in Georgia, invented an "en- 
gine" for this work. This cotton gin was simple enough to 
be run by a slave; and with it one man could "clean" as 
much cotton as 300 men could by hand. Southern planters 
at once gave their attention to meeting the new English 
demand. In 1791 we exported only 200,000 pounds : in 1800 
the amount was 100 times that; and this was doubled the third 
year after. Soon the South could boast, "Cotton is King." 



346 



THE AMERICA OF 1800 



Farming tools and methods had improved httle in four 
thousand years. The American farmer with strenuous toil 
Methods of Scratched the soil with a clumsy wooden homemade 
farming ^j^}] plow. He had no other machines for horses to 
draw, except a rude harrow and a cart. He sowed his grain 
by hand, cut it with the sickle of primitive times, and 
threshed it out on the barn floor with the flail — older than 
history — if he did not tread it out by cattle, as the ancient 




Farm Tools in 1800. The only farm "machine" not shown is the wagon. 



Egyptians did. The first threshing machine had been in- 
vented in 1785, but it had not yet come into use. The 
cradle-scythe — a hand tool, but a vast improvement over 
the old sickle — was patented in 1803. The first improve- 
ments on the plow date from experiments on different shapes 
of mold boards by Thomas Jefferson, Soon after 1800 ap- 
peared the cast-iron wheeled plow. This was soon to work 
a revolution — permitting deeper and more rapid tillage ; 
but for some years farmers refused to use it, asserting that 



SIMPLICITY AND FRUGALITY 



347 



the iron "poisoned" the ground. Drills, seeders, mowers, 
reapers, binders, were still in the future. 

In the cities a small class of merchants imitated in a quiet 
way the luxury of the corresponding class in England, — with 
spacious homes, silver-laden tables, and, on occa- Home life 
sion, crimson-velvet attire. The great planters of ^^^ wages 
the South, too, lived in open-handed wastefulness, though 
with little real comfort. Otherwise American society was 
simple and frugal, — with a standard of living far below that 




Modern Plowing 

of to-day. Necessities of life cost more (so far as they were 
not produced in the home), and wages were lower. Hodcar- 
rier and skilled mason received about half the wage (in pur- 
chasing value) paid for corresponding labor to-day and for a 
labor day lasting from sunrise to sunset. (These wages 
were fifty per cent better than before the Revolution, — so 
that John Jay, high-minded gentleman that he was, com- 
plains bitterly about the "exorbitant" wages demanded by 
artisans — ^much as John Winthrop did in 1632 or many 
a like gentleman of to-day.) The unskilled laborers who 
toiled on the public buildings and streets of Washington 
from 1793 to 1800 received seventy dollars a year "and 



348 THE AMERICA OF 1800 

found" — which did not include clothing. And the income 
of the professional classes was insignificant by later stand- 
ards. John Marshall's practice, when he was at the head 
of the Virginia bar, brought him about $5000 ; but this was 
an unusually large amount. Says Henry Adams (I, 21) : — 

" Many a country clergyman, eminent for piety and even for 
hospitality, brought up a family and laid aside some savings on a 
salary of five hundred dollars a year. President Dwight [of Yale] 
. . . eulogizing the life of Abijah Weld, pastor of Attleborough, 
declared that on a salary of $ 250 Mr, Weld brought up eleven 
children, besides keeping a hospitable house and maintaining 
charity to the poor." 

Such ministers eked out their salaries by tilling small 
farms with their own hands. The homes of farmers and 
mechanics foimd clean sand a substitute for carpets, and 
pewter or wooden dishes sufficient for tableware. Their 
houses had no linen on the table, nor prints on the wall, 
nor many books, nor any periodicals, unless perhaps a 
SimpUcity small Weekly paper. No woman had ever cooked 
and by a stove. Household lights were dim, ill-smell- 

ruga y -^^^ candles, molded in the home, or smoky wicks in 
whale-oil lamps. If a householder let his fire "go out," he 
borrowed live coals from a neighbor or struck sparks into 
tinder with flint and steel. If man or child had to have an 
arm amputated, or broken bones set, the pain had to be borne 
without the merciful aid of anesthetics. The village shop 
made and sold shoes and hats. All the other clothing of the 
ordinary family was homemade, and from homespim cloth. 
The awkward shapes of coat and trousers that resulted 
from such tailoring long remained marked features in Yan- 
kee caricature. And says Professor McMaster, — "Many a 
well-to-do father of a family of to-day expends each year on 
coats and frocks and finery a sum sufficient a hundred years 
ago to have defrayed the public expenses of a flourishing 
village, — schoolmaster, constable, and highways included." 
Farmer, mechanic, and "storekeeper" all had plain food in 
abundance, but in little variety. Breakfast, "dinner," and 
"supper" saw much the same combinations of salt pork. 



POLITICS AND CULTURE 349 

salt fish, potatoes and turnips, rye bread, and dried apples, 
with fresh meat for the town mechanic perhaps once a 
week. Among vegetables not yet known were cauliflower, 
sweet corn, lettuce, cantaloupes, rhubarb, and tomatoes ; 
while tropical fruits, like oranges and bananas, were the 
rare luxuries of the rich. Even the rich could not have ice 
in summer. In all externals, life was to change more in the 
next hundred years than it had changed in the past thousand. 

Political standards were low, as we have seen. Says 
Professor McMaster very truly {With the Fathers, 71) : — 
"In all the frauds and tricks that go to make up "Practical 
the worst form of 'practical politics' — ^the men politics" 
who founded our State and National governments were al- 
ways our equals and often our masters." To be sure there 
was less bribery than in more recent times. The great 
corporations, — railways, municipal lighting companies, and 
so on, — which, in their scramble for special privileges, were 
to become the chief source of corrupting later legislatures 
and city councils, had not yet appeared. Public servants 
had infinitely less temptation to betray their trust for private 
gain than now; but public opinion as to the crime was far less 
sensitive than to-day. 

For private life, drunkenness was the American vice — 
with victims in all classes and in almost every family. The 
diet created a universal craving for strong 
drink. Foreigners complained, too, of a lack 
of cleanliness, and were shocked by the brutal fights at 
public gatherings, with biting off of ears and gouging out 
of eyes as commonplace accompaniments. Likewise, they 
found American society coarse and immodest in conversa- 
tion (like English society of Fielding's day, two generations 
earlier), but not immoral in conduct. 

As everywhere else in the world, barbarous legal punish- 
ments and loathsome jail life still flourished. The insane 
were caged, like wild beasts, in dungeons underneath the 
ordinary prisons ; and debt brought more men to prison than 
any crime. 

America was justly famous for its political writings in con- 



350 THE AMERICA OF 1800 

nection with the Revolution and the Constitution. Other- 
wise, after the death of Frankhn, the country had had no 
Dearth of nian of letters ; and it had little desire for literature, 
uterature Painting reached a high point with Copley, 
and art Stuart, and Benjamin West ; but these American 

artists could not earn a mechanic's living at home, and were 
forced to seek patronage in England. New England had 
developed her remarkable system of private endowed acad- 
emies, for a few bright and energetic boys, as fitting schools 
for college ; but the Boston Latin School was almost the 
only survivor of the Puritan attempt at public "grammar 
schools." Several more colleges had been organized toward 
1800, but the instruction was barren, and attendance was 
meager. Harvard (page 315) had a faculty of a presi- 
dent, three professors, and four tutors. The elementary 
schools, even in New England, had decayed, commonly, 
into a two-months badly taught term in winter, for boys, 
and a like term, worse taught, in summer, for girls. 

In the South, North Carolina and Georgia were trying, 
rather feebly, to redeem the pledges of their democratic 
constitutions (page 222). North Carolina had established 
fourteen academies, supported by land grants and State 
lotteries; and Georgia set aside large amounts of wild land 
and of confiscated I^oyalist property to support schools and 
academies. That State also planned a noble "university" 
— which was to comprise all the public schools of all grades. 
Distinct instruction in law and medicine was beginning in 
two or three of the larger colleges ; but, for many years 
to come, most young men who wished to become lawyers or 
doctors prepared themselves mainly by studying in the 
oflSce of an old practitioner. Most colleges offered training 
in theology. 

Three hopeful conditions in 1800, not yet touched upon, 
explain in large measure the wonderful progress of the 
Hopeful American people in the century that followed, 
conditions These were the abundance of free land, the intellec- 
tual activity among even the agricultural classes; and the pe- 
culiar American talent for mechanical invention. 



FREE LAND 351 

1. Free land, to be had for the taking, had been from the 
beginning the basis of American democracy. In colonial 
times it had protected the artisan against attempts 

by the aristocratic classes to keep down his wages 
by law — since he could lay aside his trade for a farm. So, 
too, in 1800, free land for some meant better wages and in- 
dustrial freedom for all the working classes. True, wages 
and the standard of living were still low ; but this was be- 
cause no great amount of wealth had been accumulated. 
Such wealth and comfort as existed was distributed less un- 
equally than novi. For the farming class itself, too, free land 
meant that only the best soils had to be used, and that, 
even on them, there was no such demand for costly fertiliz- 
ing as in the Old World. Agriculture, the main American 
industry, was amazingly productive, even with the primi- 
tive methods of that day. 

This free land, however, urns already becoming ""less free." 
At the close of the Revolution, Virginia and other States with 
large unsettled territory paid their soldiers largely in military 
"land warrants." Each such warrant authorized the holder 
to locate and get title to a certain amount of any of the 
State's wild land. But such lands were mainly at some 
distance from the settlements, and multitudes of soldiers 
sold their land warrants — often for a song — to large 
speculators, who then secured vast tracts in the most desir- 
able districts. As early as 1784, Washington declared that 
such " f orestallers " had left hardly a valuable spot in 
Virginia's lands within reach of the Ohio. He had reason 
to know, — for he was just back from the West where he 
himself had located enormous holdings, partly on military 
warrants purchased from soldiers. 

2. The second consideration was even more important. 
In every Old- World land the men who tilled the intellectual 
soil were a peasantry — slow, stolid, unenter- tniers^oYthe 
prising, wholly distinct from the rest of society, soil 
Here, in 1800, the men who tilled the soil — to quote 
Francis A. Walker's passage : — 



352 



THE AMERICA OF 1800 



"were the same kind of men precisely as those who filled the 
professions or were engaged in commercial or mechanical pursuits. 
Of two sons of the same mother, one [the weakling of the family 

perhaps, and so thought 
unfit for a farmer] became 
a lawyer, perhaps a judge, 
or went down to the city 
and became a merchant, or 
gave himself to political 
affairs and became a gov- 
ernor or a member of Con- 
gress. The other stayed 
upon the ancestral home- 
stead, or made a new one 
for himself and his children 
out of the public domain, 
remaining all his life a 
plain hardworking farmer 
[the children of the two 
families mingling without 
suspicion of social or in- 
tellectual distinction]. . . . There ivas then no other country in 
the world, . . . where equal mental activity and alertness [were] ap- 
plied to the soil as to trade and industry.'" 




A Colonial Spinning Wheel, now preserved 
in Daniel Webster's old home in Marshfield, 
Massachusetts. In Webster's boyhood, his 
mother, in the farm home, spun the wool for 
his clothing on this wheel or on one hke it. 



3. Of mechanical insight and invention, to quote General 
Walker again, — - "There is only one nation in the world to 
Mechanical the mass of whosc population this form of genius 
invention ^^^^ ]jq attributed. That nation is our own. There 
are few Americans of American stock . . . who have not 
mechanical aptitude in a measure which elsewhere would 
make them marked men. ' The American invents as the 
Greek chiselled, as the Venetian painted, as the modern Italian 
sings.'" 



CHAPTER XIX 

THE REVOLUTION OF 1800 

As real a revolution in the principles of our government, as that of 1776 
was in its form. — Thomas Jefferson. 

A Republic, you tell me, is a government in which the People have an 
essential share in the Sovereignty. Is not the whole Sovereignty, my friend, 
sssentially in the People? — Samuel Adams, in a letter to John Adams. 

From 1801 to 1809, American history is sometimes 
called "the biography of Thomas Jefferson." The nation 
believed in him ; Congress swayed to his wish ; Thomas 
his great Secretaries (Madison for State affairs, Jefferson 
and Gallatin ^ for the Treasury) admired and followed him. 

Jefferson was six feet, two and a half inches tall. His 
frame was vigorous but loose-jointed. His hair was sandy ; 
and his face irregular, freckled, and sunny. He was an 
athletic and reckless horseman, an enthusiastic farmer, and 
the valued correspondent of the most famous scholars of 
Europe. The accounts of contemporaries show him, sitting 
on one hip with neglected dress and slippers down-at-the- 
heel, chatting with rambling charm ; or, with methodical 
industry, recording minutest weather details ; or drawing 
up neat tables to show, through a period of several years, 
the dates for the appearance of thirty-seven vegetables in 
the Washington markets ; or reporting judicial decisions — 
in the first American Reports; or devising rules for parlia- 
mentary procedure — again the first volume of its kmd ; 
or directing, with gentle suggestion, the politics of a distant 
State ; or discussing with a French scientist the latest 

' Gallatin was a Swiss emigrant, and, for some years past, a leader of the radical 
Republican party in Pennsylvania. He had criticized Hamilton's financial policy 
keenly, and had even been identified with the earlier stages of the movement that 
resulted in the Whisky Rebellion. 

353 



354 THE JEFFERSONIAN REPUBLICANS 

discovery in that celebrity's special field ; or inditing some 
other form of that voluminous correspondence which well 
earns him the title "the greatest American letter- writer," 
In 1800 Jefferson had already had a distinguished career. 
He entered the Virginia Assembly in the memorable session 
His earUer of 1769. Four years later he was one of the leaders 
career jj^ that body in organizing the first Intercolo- 

nial Committee of Correspondence. In 1775 he became a 
delegate to the Continental Congress. A year later he was 
again in the Virginia Assembly, to lead a social revolution 
in that State, by legislation, amid all the turmoil of war. 
Reforms in Under his guidance, the reform party, in 1777- 
virginia 1778, (1) prohibited further importation of slaves 
into the State ; (2) swept away the church establishment, 
along with every vestige of ancient checks upon religious 
freedom ; (3) overthrew entail and primogeniture — the 
semifeudal bulwarks of the landed aristocracy ; and (4) re- 
placed the complex barbarities of the old legal system by a 
new code simple, compact, and humane. In all this struggle 
Jefferson was supported by the solid backing of the western 
Scotch-Irish counties. His victory Americanized Virginia 
and consolidated there the Democratic party he was after- 
ward to organize for the nation at large. 

The aristocratic opposition was particularly bitter against 
the abolition of the rule of primogeniture. The leaders 
pleaded for at least a double inheritance for the oldest son. 
Not unless it can be shown that the oldest son needs twice 
as much to feed and clothe him, rei)lied Jefferson. Soon 
after, Jefferson's only son, a babe, died from exposure in a 
midwinter flight from a Tory raid ; and the aristocratic 
planters were not ashamed to call this calamity a "righteous 
judgment of God," "destroying the family of the man who 
had wished to destroy all families." 

Jefferson's views had been even more far-reaching than 
the actual accomplishment. He had hoped for gradual 
emancipation of slaves and for a noble system of public 
schools. The latter scheme he returned to enthusiasti- 



THOMAS JEFFERSON 355 

cally, but with little result, in his old age; and he did 
at last carry out his plans for reorganizing the University 
of Virginia — on the main lines along which the State 
universities were afterwards to develop. 

For the next two years (1779-1780) Jefferson served as 
governor of Virginia. Then after brief retirement, due to 
private griefs, he reappeared in the Continental Congress in 
1783, for brief but distinguished service (pages 252, 255). 
Next we see him American Minister in France. There he 
watched the early stages of the French Revolu- ^ife in 
tion with eager sympathy, and while preserving France, 
in public the impartial attitude proper for a foreign 
minister, he was in private the valued adviser of Lafayette 
and other reformers, whose inexperienced enthusiasm he was 
sometimes able to direct wisely. French thought now se- 
cured a strong influence upon him ; but his admiration for 
that country in no way weakened his Americanism. He urged 
Monroe to come to Europe, "because it will make you adore 
your own country, its soil, climate, equality, liberty, laws, 
people, manners" ; and he predicted that, while many Euro- 
peans would remove to America, no man then living would 
see an American seek a home in Europe. In 1790 he returned 
to America to take a place in Washington's Cabinet, and 
then to build skillfully the party of the people, which tri- 
umphed in his election to the presidency. It is characteristic 
that, at the close of his brief Autobiography, in counting 
up his services to his fellows, Jefferson gives prominent place 
to his efforts in making navigable a Virginia creek and to 
his introducing into South Carolina a heavier and better 
rice than was before grown in America. "The greatest 
service which can be rendered to any country," he comments, 
"is to add a useful plant to its cultivation." 

The two things that men remember against this broad 
background of varied activity are that Jefferson gave im- 
mortal form to the principles of the political Revolution of 
1776, in the Declaration of Independence, and that he stood 
for the democratic aspirations of the social "revolution of 



356 THE JEFFERSONIAN REPUBLICANS 

1800." The modest shaft that marks his resting place 
bears only the words (selected by himself), "Author of the 
Declaration of Independence, of the statute of Virginia for 
Religious freedom, and Father of the University of Virginia." 
With true insight, Jefferson represented in that epitaph his 
work in three related fields, — political liberty, religious 
liberty, and higher popular education. History adds the 
proud dictum of one of his biographers: "If America is 
right, Thomas Jefferson was right." 

Jefferson's political principles, for domestic concerns, were 
(1) trust in the people ; (2) restriction of all government,^ 
Teflferson's especially of the Central government ; (3) frugal- 
pouticai ity; (4) simplicity; and (5) "encouragement of 
for"do-^^ agriculture, and of commerce as her handmaid," 
mestic rather than of manufactures. These principles 

" ^^^ are summed up admirably in his first inaugu- 

ral. "Absolute acquiescence in the decisions of the 
majority is the vital principle of republics." The best 
government is one that "while it restrains men from 
injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to 
regulate their own pursuits, and shall not take from the 
mouth of labor the bread it has earned." He further 
declares his purpose to secure "equal and exact justice 
to all men," and to defend "freedom of religion, freedom of 
the press, and freedom of the person." 

As to foreign affairs Jefferson hoped to begin a golden age 
of peace. War was a blunder. Army and navy we could 
Devotion dispense with. At most, we could need only " com- 
to peace mercial coercion" to secure our rights from other 
nations: "Our commerce is so valuable to them," he ar- 
gued, "that they will be glad to purchase it when the only 
price we ask is that they do us justice." Years later, when 

1 Government in that day was almost wholly repressive, — or beneficent to a 
privileged class only, at the expense of other classes. It did not yet dream of 
providing schools, libraries, hospitals, asylums, weather bureaus, or the manifold 
other activities of general helpfulness now belonging to it. In the closing years 
of his administration, Jefferson became one of the early advocates of this wider 
helpfulness (page 3G4). 



THE "REVOLUTION OF 1800" 357 

rude experience had shattered his noble dream of universal 
peace, Jefferson turned to a vision of a New-World peace, with 
the United States as the protecting elder brother of Ameri- 
can nations. He hopes for "fraternization among all 
American nations," and dwells upon the impor- 
tance of their "coalescing in an American policy of the 
totally independent of that of Europe," adding, Monroe 
"When our strength will permit us to give the law 
to our hemisphere, it should be that the meridian of the mid- 
Atlantic should be the line of demarcation between peace 
and war, — on this side of which no act of hostility should 
be permitted." And again, "The day is not far distant 
when we [the United States] may formally require a median 
of partition through the ocean, on the hither side of which no 
European gun shall ever be fired, nor an American on the 
other, and when, during the rage of eternal war in Europe, 
the lion and the lamb within our regions shall lie down in 
peace." 

The election of Jefferson marked a true peaceful revolu- 
tion. The nation had resumed its progress toward democ- 
racy, after the years of interruption due to the ^-^^ .. ^^^^_ 
conservative crusade for a strong government, lution " of 
Jefferson urged a friend to accept a place in the ^^°° 
Cabinet so that he might be of service "in the new estab- 
lishment of Republicanism . . . hitherto we have seen only 
its travestie." The change, however, was rather in the 
spirit of the administration than in its governmental acts. 

" Jeffersonian simplicity" has become a byword. At 
each previous inauguration, the President had been driven 
in state, in coach and six, to the ceremony. Jeffer- .. Jeffer- 
son walked quietly from his boarding house to the soman 
Capitol to take the oath of office. Washington ^i^^Pi'^ty" 
had "opened" Congress in person by a speech that left 
many hints of a resemblance to the English "speech from 
the throne"; and Congress had replied by drawing up an 
"address of thanks," and then driving in formal procession 
to the President's residence and standing bareheaded in his 



358 JEFFERSON'S ADMINISTRATION 

presence while it was read. Adams had jealously guarded 
all these trappings. But from the first, Jefferson set the 
example that all communication with Congress, even the 
opening messages, should be by writing. (In 1913 Woodrow 
Wilson restored the personal speech to Congress withotd the 
original aristocratic trappings.) In matters of hospitality 
at the White House, too, Jefferson discarded the elaborate 
and courtly ceremonial of Washington and Adams — pos- 
sibly to an unwise degree, since the new " pell-mell " 
methods irritated needlessly certain old-world diplomats at 
Washington. 

Not much legislative reform was found necessary. The 
vicious Alien and Sedition Acts had been enacted for only 
two years, and had expired. The fourteen-year Natural- 
ization law of 1797 was repealed, along with all internal 
revenue taxes (whisky tax and stamp duties), 
of the and with the Judiciary Act of 1801. The Fed- 

judiciary eralists charged that this repeal was unconsti- 

Act of 1801 . , ,*' , 1 T» 1 1 • 111 1 

tutional, and that the Kepublicans had dragged 
the judiciary into politics ! Congress is forbidden by 
the Constitution to decrease the salary of a judge, or to 
dismiss him from office. Can it, then, take salary and 
office from the judge by abolishing the court .'^ To prevent 
the Supreme Court from interfering with the repeal, another 
law adjourned the sittings of that body for some months. 
(This precedent of abolishing a Federal Court has been 
followed once in later years, when the Commerce Court was 
abolished in 1913.) 

One other reform in finance is notable. In the past the 
administration had had the employment of whatever funds 
Economy Cougress raised. Now Jefferson and Gallatin 
and the limited their own tremendous power in this niat- 
pu ic e ^^^^ 1^^^ calling upon Congress to make specific 
appropriations only. This precedent has been followed 
ever since. The debt had never been decreased by the 
Federalists ; and the war flurry of 1798 had raised it, 
through new loans, to $83,000,000, with an interest charge 
each year of $3,500,000. During the last years of Fed- 



AND THE CIVIL SERVICE 359 

eralist rule, moreover, ordinary expenditure had outrun 
ordinary income. One of Jefferson's dearest hopes was 
to aboHsh the national debt, and he and Gallatin planned 
to get rid of half of it in eight years. The $6,000,000 
formerly spent on army and navy was cut to $1,000,000 
(the army being decreased to 3000 men and most of the war 
vessels being docked), and every saving possible in any 
other department was rigidly enforced. In 1803 the pur- 
chase of Louisiana added $15,000,000 to the debt, and war 
with the Barbary Pirates compelled more military expense. 
The giving up of internal taxes, too, had greatly reduced the 
revenue. Still Jefferson's promises were well kept : at the 
end of his eight years, the debt had been cut down to 
$57,000,000, with an interest charge of only $2,000,000 a 
year. 

Jefferson's most annoying problems had to do with the 
Civil Service. The Federalist Presidents had excluded Re- 
publicans from all office. They had not had to ^j^^ (.j^jj 
dismiss any : none got in. This policy, too, had Service 
been emphatically avowed. Washington wrote to ^^^^ ^™ 
Pickering, his Secretary of War in his second administra- 
tion : "I shall not, while-T have the honor of administering 
the government, bring a man into any office of conse- 
quence, knowingly, whose political tenets are adverse to the 
measures the general government are pursuing; for this, 
in my opinion, would be a sort of political suicide." And 
Senator Bayard, as mouthpiece for Adams, declared, "The 
politics of the office-seeker will be the great object of the 
President's attention, and an invincible objection if differ- 
ent from his own." Washington and Adams did not use 
office to pay for party services : they did use it to strengthen 
the " right party " (their party) and so " save the coun- 
try." This attitude was morally very far from the later 
spoils system of Jackson's day, but it was practically sure 
to glide into that system. 

Now had come the first change of party. If Jefferson 
followed Washington's policy to its logical conclusion, he 
would dismiss all officeholders, to make room for Re- 



360 JEFFERSON'S ADMINISTRATION 

publicans. His opponents feared, and many supporters 
hoped, that he would do so. Jefferson removed only about 
twenty oflBcials for political reasons, — these mainly Federal 
marshals and attorneys ; ^ and in spite of all changes from 
various causes, more than half of the officials of March 4, 
1801, were still holding office four years later. 

Moreover, Jefferson and Gallatin were the first statesmen 
in the world to think out the principles upon which alone a 
non-partisan civil service can be permanently maintained. 
They saw and said that each officeholder ought to be at 
liberty to think and vote as his conscience led, but that, 
to preserve this freedom, he must refrain from "electioneer- 
ing activity," or, in modern phrase, from "offensive partisan- 
ship." Gallatin prepared a circular to warn subordinates 
in his department that "while freedom of opinion and free- 
dom of suffrage are imprescriptible rights, the President 
would regard any exercise of official influence to control the 
same rights in others as destructive of the fundamental 
principles of a Republican constitution." Gallatin makes 
clear that this was to apply to official activity /or the adminis- 
tration as well as against it. Jefferson's views are set forth in 
his correspondence : — 

"Mr. Adams' last appointments, when he knew he was naming 
counsellors and aids for me and not for himself, I set aside as far as 
depends on me, and will not deliver commissions when still in 
executive hands. Officers who have been guilty of gross abuses 
of office, such as marshals packing juries, etc. [to secure conviction 
under prosecution for "sedition"], I shall now remove, as my pred- 
ecessor should have done. . . . The right of opinion shall suffer 
no invasion from me'' (liCtter to Gerry, March 29, 1801). He 
then thought that "of the thousands of officers in the United 
States, a very few individuals only, probably not twenty, will be 
removed" (Letter to Rush, March 24). Later he adds "indus- 
trious partisanship" as a proper cause for removal ; and July 21, 
in reply to Federalist critics, he asks whether the minority expect 

' From the very first, Jefferson stated his intention to change some of these 
officers, as the only means left him to partly correct the Federalist monopoly of 
the courts. The courts themselves he could not change, but he could keep open 
these "doorways." 



AND THE FEDER.\LIST COURTS 361 

to continue to monopolize the offices from which, when in power, 
they excluded all their opponents, and queries how a "due par- 
ticipation" for the majority is to be obtained, since vacancies "by 
death are few, by resignation, none." About a year later he 
admits that his program has not been followed "with the un- 
deviating resolution I could have wished" (Oct. 25, 1802). 

Even after the repeal of the Judiciary Act of 1801, the 
Federalists remained in complete possession of the courts ; 
and those courts showed a bitter and shameful par- Federalist 
tisanship. Chief Justice Dana of Massachusetts, partisanship 
in 1798, during a political campaign, in a charge to *"* e courts 
a grand jury, attacked the Republican party (including 
Jefferson especially) as ''apostles of atheism, anarchy, blood- 
shed, and plunder.'' His charge was toasted at a Boston 
banquet, as dictated by "intelligence, integrity, and patriot- 
ism." Even Washington so approved it that he sent copies 
to his friends. 

Justice Chase of the Supreme Court had given even greater 
cause of offense. In 1803, in a charge to a Maryland grand 
jury, he had declared that the Republican attempt in 
Maryland to establish manhood suffrage, ''ivill, in my 
judgment, take away all security for property and personal 
liberty [in that State] . . . The modern doctrines . . . that 
all men . . . are entitled to equal liberty and equal rights 
have brought this mighty mischief upon us." Chase had 
presided also at two "sedition" trials, and had manifested 
there a partisan and browbeating disposition. Twice his 
violence drove from the court the most eminent lawyers 
of the circuit ; and during the political campaign of 1800, 
he had broken up the sessions in order to make Federalist 
speeches. 

Jefferson felt keenly the need of correcting the partisan 
character of this appointive branch of the government. In 
December, 1801, he wrote : "They [the Federalists] The failure 
have retired into the Judiciary as a stronghold, of impeach- 
There the remains of Federalism are to be preserved "^^^^^ 
and fed from the treasury ; and from that battery all the works 
of Republicanism are to be beaten down and destroyed." 



362 JEP^FERSON'S ADMINISTRATION 

But the principles of the RepubHcans with regard to the gov- 
ernment forbade them to enlarge the courts, and so get con- 
trol. And in any case they could not very well have done 
that just after repealing the vicious Federalist law. All Fed- 
eral judges held "during good behavior" ; and the only way 
left for the Republicans to get a foothold was to remove 
judges by impeachment. After much hesitation and only 
half-heartedly, Jefferson and his party tried this method. 
Justice Pickering, of the New Hampshire District, was 
removed for drunkenness while on duty,^ but an attempt 
to remove Justice Chase from the Supreme Court for his 
partisan conduct failed of the necessary two- thirds vote in 
the Senate. Then the movement was dropped. 

The breakdown of this attack upon Federalism in the 
Courts left John Marshall free to complete Hamilton's work 
John and to make the Constitution a National constitu- 

Marshaii \^[q^^ \yy }jjg judicial decisions. Marshall was one of 
Adams' latest appointments. He served as Chief Justice from 
1801 to 1835 ; and his intellectual dominance over his associ- 
ates brought to his way of thought five Republican justices 
appointed by Jefferson and Madison to outweight him. He 
was a man of simple manners, of direct, upright, engaging 
character, of mighty intellect, but of strong prejudices. 

Marshall's first great decision was in the famous case of 
Marhury vs. Madison. Adams' appointments had been com- 
" Marbury pl^ted SO late ou March 3 that some of the com- 
vs. Madi- missions were left undelivered. Jefferson declared 
such papers of no account, and made new appoint- 
ments. A certain Marbury, whom Adams had named a Jus- 
tice of the Peace for the District of Columbia, sued in the Su- 
preme Court for a writ of mandamus, to compel Madison (the 

^ The Federalists defended Pickering on the ground of insanity, — insisting 
at the same time that there was no constitutional ground for impeachment. In- 
deed, until recently it has been held that the "high crimes and misdemeanors," 
named in the Constitution as the occasion for impeachment, must be such offenses 
as the accused man might be indicted for before a criminal court. The difficulty 
was evaded this time in the Senate by voting that Pickering was " guilty as charged." 
In 1913, the Senate, without any evasion, removed .Justice Archbold from the 
United States Commerce Court for "graft," although no law could reach his 
offense. 



AND JOHN MARSHALL 363 

new Secretary of State) to issue to him his withheld commis- 
sion. The court dechired, through Marshall's pen, that it 
had no jurisdiction in such a suit.^ 'i'rue, the Judiciary Act of 
1780 had distinctly given the Supreme Court authority to 
issue just such writs ; but since the Constitution itself did not 
name any such contest between a citizen and a public officer 
as included in the original jurisdiction for the Supreme 
Court, that particular provision of the law of 1789 was now 
declared unconstitutional and void. 

This was the first time the Supreme Court declared void 
any part of an Act of Congress. The clause was one con- 
ferring power upon the court itself. No other so pjj.g^ ^g. 
modest opportunity could have been found. But sumption 
the argument of the Chief Justice went on, far be- the court to 
yond the immediate case, to establish this power void an act 
of the courts in all cases where, in their judgment, ° ongress 
they might find conflict between a law and the fundamental 
law. The decision was to become the basis for future exten- 
sion of this power. 

In 1804 Jefferson was reelected by 162 electoral votes to 
14 ; and even in the hold-over Senate of 34 members, there 
were only 7 Federalists. Jefferson's popularity Jefferson's 
seemed higher than ever. Early in his second term, reelection 
the Vermont legislature requested him to permit his name to 
be used a third time, for the campaign of 1808, and this nomi- 
nation was promptly seconded by legislatures in seven other 
States. Jefferson declined, and used the opportunity to estab- 
lishfirmly one more Republican doctrine. Washington's re- 
fusal to be a candidate for a third term had no constitutional 
bearing. He refused for purely personal reasons, and he 
felt it needful to excuse himself against a possible charge of 
lack of patriotism in laying down his task. Jefferson 

' Marshall's partisan feeling led him, none the less, to add that Marbury was 
legally entitled to the office. Since Marshall had been acting through March 3 
as Adams' Secretary of State, in signing commissions, he came perilously near 
acting as judge in a case in which he was himself vitally interested. Says Pro- 
fessor Channing {Jeffersonian System, 118), — "This is the one decision in Mar- 
shall's judicial career which still gives pain to all but his blindest admirers." 



364 JEPFERSON'S ADMINISTRATION 

declined, in order to establish a principle. While the Con- 
stitution was in the making, he had written from Paris 
urging that a limit should be set in that document upon 
the number of times the chief magistrate might be reelected ; 
and now he urged that some limit should be fixed by custom, 
or the tenure might come to be for life. The limit, he 
added, should be two terms, as already suggested by Wash- 
ington's action. Any longer tenure would be "dangerous 
to Republican institutions." 

This response caught the popular imagination. Addresses 
poured in from mass meetings and legislatures approving its 
And the patriotism and its doctrine, and expressing ardent 
third-term hope that the example might be followed in suc- 
princip e ceeding history. The principle became at once so 
firmly embedded in our unwritten constitution that only once 
has an attempt been made to override it. 

In Jefferson's second administration, a new tone of central- 
ization was noticeable. Republicanism had been modified by 
A tendency ^^^^ very completeness of its victory. Nearly half its 
toward cen- adherents now had formerly been Federalists, and 
trahzation g^-|| j.^Q^aij^p(^j }^.^lf Federalist in political thought. 

Moreover, the "Old Republicans" themselves, under the re- 
sponsibilities and opportunities of office, began to feel differ- 
ently toward the power of the government. Jefferson, in- 
deed, strove valiantly not to "make waste paper of the 
Constitution by construction." But he came to favor 
amendments such as would have greatly enlarged the sphere 
of the government's action. In his second inaugural, he 
called attention to the rapid decrease of the debt, and to the 
fact that only a few millions more could be taken up in the 
next few years (the rest not being due). He then suggested 
that, instead of decreasing the revenue tariffs "on luxuries," 
the surplus revenue, by a proper amendment to the Constitution, 
might be applied to "rivers, canals, roads, arts, ynanufactures, 
education, and other great objects." Soon after, he wrote 
to Gallatin that he was "impatient to begin upon canals, 
roads, colleges, etc." 



I 



AND INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS 365 

Lacking the amendments, Jefferson reluctantly acted some- 
times under the doctrine of implied powers which he had once 
denounced. The first such extension of powers con- Harbor im- 
cerned the improvement of harbors. The govern- provements 
ment raised a sunken gunboat which imperiled a harbor en- 
trance ; and this precedent led to the further removal of har- 
bor obstructions. The building of dry docks, to protect the 
unused national navy, was extended to the construction of 
public wharves for commerce. And, though Jefferson 
had looked with critical eye upon the construction of a 
Federal lighthouse in Washington's time, he now quietly 
approved large appropriations for the exceedingly useful 
coast survey, inaugurated in 1806. "The utility of the 
thing has sanctioned the infraction," he said. 

The excuse for Federal expenditure on harbors was that it 
was paid for out of the tonnage tax on vessels that used the 
harbors. But, what harbors were to Eastern com- .. intemai 
munities, roads would be to the people of the West. improve- 
Why should not the nation build such roads and "^° ^ 
pay for them out of the sale of the public lands, — to which 
they would give value.'' This was the guise under which 
the question of "internal improvements" first appeared. 

When Ohio was admitted as a State, in 1802, the national 
government still owned a vast domain within the borders of 
the new commonwealth. On the suggestion of j^ie 
Gallatin, Congress promised that one twentieth of " National 
the proceeds from the sale of those lands should be °* 
used in building roads from Atlantic rivers to the Ohio River, 
and afterward on roads within the State. The strict con- 
structionists excused the measure as a bargain between the 
United States and Ohio. Ohio, said Gallatin, could hardly 
be expected to acquiesce in the nation's retaining title to the 
vast public domain inside the State without some such sop. 
But lands sold slowly, and in 1806 Congress agreed to advance 
$30,000 (to be repaid out of the future land sales) ; and a 
survey was begun at once for "The National Road," from 
Fort Cumberland in Maryland, on the Potomac, to Wheeling 
in western Virginia, on the upper Ohio. 



360 JEFFERSON'S ADMINISTRATION 

In his next message to Congress (December, 1806), 
Jefferson urged (along with the suggestion of a necessary 
GaUatin's amendment) a national university and a system of 
" Report internal improvements to cement the union between 
° the States. Without reference to the need of an 

amendment. Congress replied by asking the executive to sub- 
mit a plan for roads and canals. This led to Gallatin's famous 
report of 1808. That paper sketched a comprehensive system 
of communication to be built during a period of ten years, at 
an expense of $2,000,000 a year. (1) Canals through Cape 
Cod, New Jersey, and other projections were to create a 
shorter and safer inside coast route. (2) A turnpike was to 
run from Maine to Georgia. And (3) turnpikes were to 
join four eastern rivers with streams beyond the mountains. 
But at this moment national revenue fell away, because of 
the embargo (page 382), and for some years all such projects 
were lost in war clouds. 

Pennsylvania, alone of the States, began to act vigorously 
for herself. In the six years after Gallatin's plan was 
Pennsyi- dropped by Congress (1809-1815), that State spent 
vania leads $2,000,000 on roads, and, under State encourage- 
ment, private corporations spent twice as much more on toll 
roads. By 1815, a thousand miles of turnpikes, with good 
bridges, linked together the important districts of the com- 
monwealth, and joined the eastern waters with Pittsburg on 
the Ohio. 

Western settlement continued in the period 1800-1810 
much as in the ten years preceding but with much less peril 
Growth of from Indians. Three distinct waves of settlement 
the West were noticeable, as for long after on frontiers. 
Backwoodsmen opened small clearings, which, after a few 
years, were bought out and enlarged by pioneer farmers, who, 
in turn, soon followed the backwoods hunters farther west, 
selling out their first homes to a more permanent set of farmers 
with more capital. 

The "backwoodsmen" were usually "squatters." The 
"farmers" secured title from the Federal government. 



GROWTH OF THE WEST 



367 



After 1800, land could be bought in 160-acre lots at two 
dollars an acre. And only one fourth of this had to be paid 
down : the rest could be paid over a period of four The credit 
years, "out of the profits of the crops." In the system for 
ten years before 1800, less than a million acres lands, 
of public land had been sold to settlers by the I800-I820 
government ; but, in the next twenty years, sales averaged a 
million acres a year, and the lines of would-be purchasers 




A CoNESTOGA Wagon. An early form of "prairie schooner" used in emigration 
from the coast districts to the Ohio after Pennsylvania bixilt her roads. 

before Western land offices suggested the phrase, "doing a 
land-oflBce business." 

Between 1800 and 1810, Ohio grew ninefold, — from 
45,000 to 406,000 ; while 24,000 people pressed on into the 
southern districts of Indiana, and half that many penetrated 
even into southern Illinois. Even the older communities 
south of the Ohio, — Kentucky and Tennessee, — doubled 
their numbers, rising to two thirds of a million. In 1811, 
1200 flatboats passed the rapids of the Ohio with cargoes of 
bacon, beef, and flour, bound down river. The West had 
found a way, also, to market large parts of its corn "on the 



368 



JEFFERSON'S ADMINISTRATION 



hoof." Each fall, immense droves of cattle and hogs 
(4000 "razor-backs" in one drove) were driven over the 
wagon roads to the eastern cities, finding subsistence as they 
moved. 

And now came the steamboat, with its promise of making 
the vast western territory accessible. The Watts stationary 
The steam- steani engine had been in use in England for sev- 
boat ^yq\ years and in 1800 there were four or five such 

engines in America. But in this country, with its tre- 
mendous distances, and its lack of roads, the first need was to 
apply steam to locomotion by water. 

As early as 1789, John Fitch, a poor man without education 
but with marked inventive genius, built a ferryboat with 




Cincinnati in 1810. From Howe's Historical Collections of Ohio. 

paddles driven by a steam engine of his own construction, 
and ran it up as well as down the river at Philadelphia for 
some months. But capital was still timid and conserva- 
tive; and, in spite of his remarkable success. Fitch could 
not raise money, east or west, to improve or continue his 
experiment ; and, after a ten years' struggle, he put an end 
to his life, in disgust and despair, in a Kentucky tavern. 
During these same years, Philadelphia had another neg- 
lected genius, Oliver Evans, who likewise built a steam 
engine suited for locomotion ; but again the inventor failed 



GROWTH OF THE WEST S69 

to secure money to finance the undertaking to practical 
success. The like was true of James Rumsey of Virginia, 
who possibly preceded even Fitch in his successful applica- 
tion of steam to water navigation. 

Robert Fulton was more fortunate. He too had spent 
heartbreaking years, both in Europe and America, in 
attempts to find capital to back his invention. Napoleon 
repulsed him as a faker — and so lost his chance for com- 
mand of the English Channel and for world empire ; but 
at last the inventor secured money from Chancellor Living- 
ston of New York. In 1807, amid the jeers of the by- 
standers, he launched the Clermont. That boat amazed 
the world by a trial trip up the river from New York to 
Albany (150 miles) in 32 hours. The next year a line of 
steamboats was plying regularly on the Hudson, and men 
were planning them on Western rivers. 



CHAPTER XX 

TERRITORIAL EXPANSION 
I. THE WESTERN HALF OF THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY 

The most important one event in Jefferson's administra- 
tion was the Louisiana Purchase. Jefferson had always 
Jefferson sympathized with the attitude of the West toward 
and the Spain's hold upon the mouth of the Mississippi 
^*^* (p. 247). When Jay in 1786 had proposed a 

treaty with Spain, whereby, in return for certain com- 
mercial concessions, we were to surrender for twenty -five 
years all claim to navigate the Mississippi, Jefferson wrote 
from Paris in solemn warning, "The act which abandons 
the navigation of the Mississippi is an act of separation be- 
tween us and the Western country." Man of peace though 
he was, he had said that such portions of the vast domain 
of dying Spain as we wanted must come to us in time, — by 
force if necessary ; but he had believed confidently that 
such territory would drop peacefully into our hands, as 
Spain's grasp weakened. 

But late in 1801 fell a thunderbolt : America learned that 
Spain had secretly ceded Louisiana back to France, then 

Spain cedes ^^^ mOSt aggreSsivC of European nations. Con- 
Louisiana gress hastily passed a war appropriation ; and 
apo eon j^ff^j-g^j^^ spite of liis French sympathies, saw that 
we must fight ^ or purchase. He instructed Livingston, 
our minister at Paris, to buy the island of New Orleans, 

^ JeflFerson said that France had become our foe "by the law of Nature." He 
wrote to Livingston : "There is on the globe one single spot, the possessor of which 
is our natural . . . enemy. . . . France, placing herself in that door, assumes 
to us an attitude of defiance. . . . The day that France takes possession of New 
Orleans . . . seals the union of two nations who, in conjunction, can maintain 
exclusive possession of the ocean. From that moment we must marry ourselves 
to the British fleet and nation." 

370 



THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE 371 

and sent Monroe, as special envoy, to help him. Monroe 
found a great and unexpected bargain practically com- 
pleted. Napoleon had suddenly changed front ; and, April 
30, 1803, for the petty price of $15,000,000, the United 
States doubled its territory. 

A splendid army of twenty-five thousand French veterans 
had just wasted away, against tropical fever and the gen- 
eralship of the Negro leader Toussaint L'Ouver- ,^ , 

. TT • • 1 li? Napoleon 

ture, m an attempt to secure Haiti as a halt- sells to the 
way station to Louisiana. Napoleon hesitated P.*"*®^ 
to send more of his soldiers to hold the swamps 
at the mouth of the Mississippi against American fron- 
tiersmen swarming down that stream. Moreover, he had 
already decided upon a new war with England ; and a 
distant colony would be exposed to almost certain seizure 
by the English navy. So he abandoned his dream of 
American colonial empire, together with his solemn pledges 
to Spain, ^ and, with characteristic abruptness, forced upon 
the American negotiators not merely the patch of ground 
they asked for at the river's mouth, but the whole western half 
of the great river valley, — which they had not particularly 
wanted. 

The heart of the American people was immediately fired 
by the grand prospect of expansion opened to them by the 
Purchase; and Jefferson wrote a few weeks later: — "Ob- 
jections are raising to the eastward [among leaders of New 
England Federalism] to the vast extent of our territory, and 
propositions are made to exchange Louisiana, or a part of it, 

' Spain had hoped to find compensation for Louisiana by inteqjosing France 
as a barrier between the United States imd her other American possessions. Talley- 
rand, who had managed the French negotiations with Spain, played upon this 
string. "The Americans," he urged, "are devoured by pride," and "mean at 
any cost to rule alone in the whole continent. . . . The only means of putting 
an end to their ambition is to shut them up within the limits Nature seems to have 
traced for them [east of the Mississippi]. . . . Spain, therefore, cannot too quickly 
engage the aid of a preponderating power, yielding to it a small part of her immense 
dominions in order to ^preserve the rest. . . . France [mistress of Louisiana] will 
be to her a wall of brass, impenetrable forever to the combined efforts of England 
and America." Finally, a specific pledge never to alienate the province to America 
became part of the price France paid. 



372 JEFFERSON'S ADMINISTRATION 

for the Floridas. But we shall get the Floridas without, 
and I would not give one inch of the waters of the Mississippi 
to any foreign power." 

A coterie of Federalist leaders offered rabid opposition 
to the ratification of the treaty, partly from hatred of Jeffer- 
son, but more from jealous dread of the West. They were 
quickly overborne ; but the discussion brought into promi- 
nence three constitutional questions, 

1. Power to acquire territory is not among the powers of 
Congress enumerated in the Constitution. According to 
The Con- ^^^ "strict construction" theory, the purchase of 
stitution Louisiana was unconstitutional. Jefferson wanted 
power* an amendment to confirm the purchase. "The 
to acquire exccutive," he wrotc, "in seizing the fugitive 
territory occurrcnce which so much advances the good 
of their country, have done an act beyond the Consti- 
tution. The legislature . . . risking themselves like faith- 
ful servants, must ratify and pay for it, and [then] throw 
themselves on the country" for an amendment, which should 
be also "an act of indemnity." But he found no one among 
his friends willing to risk the precious prize by the delay 
that must go with an attempt at amendment. Such a move 
would imply that the purchase was not fully ratified ; and 
meanwhile Napoleon might again change his mind. So that 
plan was dropped. In the debates in Congress, Republican 
members adopted frankly the doctrine of "implied powers." 
The right to acquire territory must exist, they argued, as a 
result (1) of the right to make treaties, and (2) of the power 
to make war and peace. 

2. Were the inhabitants entitled to civil and political rights? 
New Orleans had a population of 50,000. The treaty of 
CivU rights purchasc had promised that the inhabitants of 
of inhab- the district should be "incorporated in the Union 
newly '° ^^ ^^^ United States" and admitted, as soon as 
acquired possible, to all the rights of citizens. The Feder- 
temtory alists based their opposition to the treaty mainly 
on this provision. The admission of a new member to "the 



THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE 373 

partnership of States," they urged, was not permissible 
"except by the consent of all the old partners." This was 
State sovereignty doctrine. 

But the Republicans themselves hesitated to carry out 
the promise of statehood to a foreign population bitterly 
aggrieved at transfer to American rule. In the spring of 
1804 Congress divided the newly acquired region into two 
parts. The larger northern part (almost uninhabited) , styled 
the "District of Louisiana," was attached to Indiana Terri- 
tory (page 258). The southern part was created TheTerri- 
"The Territory of New Orleans" ; but the govern- tory of New 
ment was intrusted to a governor, council, and ^^^^^ 
judges all appointed by the President; and provision was 
made for jury trial in capital cases only. 

This was a denial of all right of self-government to a 
highly civilized and densely settled district. It seemed 
strangely out of place at the hand of Jeifersonians, and it 
caused loud outcry in New Orleans. The Republicans de- 
fended the constitutionality of the Act on the ground that 
the guarantees in the Constitution applied only to citizens 
of the States, not to inhabitants of "territory belonging to 
the United States" (3 below). ^ 

3. The treaty promised certain exemptions from tariffs 
to French and Spanish ships in Louisiana ports for twelve 
years. The Constitution requires that "all ., 
duties shall be uniform throughout the United belonging to 
States." Was there a conflict between these the United 

. . ^ States ' 

provisions .'' 

The answer depends upon the meaning of "United 
States" in the clause quoted. That term, territorially, has 
two meanings. To-day we give it commonly the larger 

1 In 1812, after a bitter struggle in Congress, the Territory of New Orleans 
came into the Union as the State of Louisiana. The New England Federalists 
resisted the admission furiously, because it seemed to transfer political power to 
the South. Josiah Quincy, their leader in Congress, affirmed: "I am compelled 
to declare it as my deliberate opinion that, if this bill passes, the bonds of this union 
are, virtually, dissolved ; that the States which compose it are free from their moral obli- 
gations, arid that, as it will be the right of all, so it will be the duty of some, to prepare, 
definitely, for a separation: amicably, if they can; violently, if they must. ..." 



374 TERRITORIAL EXPANSION 

sense in which it signifies all the land under the government 
of the American nation, — States, Territories, and unor- 
ganized Domain, But the Constitution, certainly in some 
places and probably in all, uses the term to signify only the 
territory within the States. Territory not within a State 
was not referred to as "part of the United States," but as 
"belonging to the United States" (Article IV). In this 
sense, New Orleans was not, in 1803-1810, a part of the 
United States. For such "territory" Congress is au- 
thorized to make "all needful rules and regulations." 

Almost identical questions have arisen since, in connec- 
tion with the acquisition of Florida and the Philippines. 
In the Florida case, the Supreme Court held that the ports 
of that newly acquired territory were not ports of the United 
States, and that the revenue laws of the United States did 
not apply there unless expressly extended by act of Con- 
gress. In the other case, the Court upheld a tariff between the 
"insular possessions" and the rest of the "United States." 

n. WEST FLORIDA AND THE TEXAS CLAIM 

The Louisiana Purchase gave rise, also, to the West 
Florida question. Under France, before 1763, Louisiana 
Louisiana ^^^^ included a strip of Gulf coast east of the Missis- 
and West sippi's mouth. But when France ceded Louisiana 
°" ^ to Spain (1763), England had already secured that 

strip and urns governing it as "West Florida" (from the 
Iberville, or eastern mouth of the Mississippi, to the Ap- 
palachicola) . The treaty of 1763 between Spain and Eng- 
land inade these boundaries plain. Louisiana then com- 
prised (1) the vast valley west of the Mississippi, and 
(2) the island of New Orleans bounded on the east by 
the Iberville. In 1783 Spain recovered both Louisiana 
(from France) and West Florida (from England.) But she 
did not reunite them. She kept the two provinces under 
separate governments and under these separate names; and 
in 1800 she ceded back to France only the one she then 
called Louisiana. (Maps on page 376.) 



WEST FLORIDA 375 

Livingston had been instructed to get West Florida if 
possible. Now, taking advantage of the vague wording 
of his purchase treaty, he set up the claim that he _ 

U J J • ''T • • " • +U • The United 

had done so — using Louisiana in the meaning states 
of forty years before, in place of its meaning for p,*^™,^ ^®^* 
twenty years last past. Indeed he urged the 
government to use "the favorable moment" to take pos- 
session, "even though a little force should be necessary," 
Jefferson seems to have approved the idea. John Randolph, 
the spokesman for the administration in Congress, declared 
we had bought the mouth of "the Mobile with its widely ex- 
tended branches ; and there is not now a single stream of note 
rising within the United States and falling into the Gulf . . . 
which is not entirely our own, the Appalachicola excepted." 

But when Napoleon sent his lieutenant, Laussat, to 
America in 1803, to take formal possession of Louisiana 
from Spain, in order to transfer it to the United States, he 
told that officer plainly that the eastern boundary was the 
Mississippi and the Iberville. Laussat so told Jefferson ; 
and we received Louisiana with this understanding and with- 
out protest. None the less, a few weeks later, Congress 
created West Florida into a United States reveriue district, 
and annexed it to the Territory of Mississippi. This 
"Mobile Act," however, was never put in force. Spain's 
protest was so unanswerable that Jefferson was driven into 
discreditable evasions in trying to explain his position. 

Thus the matter slumbered six years. In 1808 Napoleon 
seized Spain, and soon the Spanish colonies in _ 

. . , , . , , The revolu- 

America, one by one, became independent states, tion in West 
In West Florida this movement was managed f^j^''^^*" 
by Americans who had migrated across the Iber- 
ville and formed settlements between that river and the 
Perdido. In July, 1810, they demanded from the Spanish 
governor a remodeling of the government. For . , , 

1-11 1-1 -IT- 1 And the 

a while they acted in harmony with him ; but seizure by 
soon they issued a declaration of independence, ^® Umted 
and applied to the United States for annexation. 
October 27, President Madison ordered the American gov- 



376 



THE WEST FLORIDA MESS 




French Louisiana and Spanish Florida, 1756. (With dividing line at the 

Perdido.) 




English West Florida, 1773-1783. (From the Mississippi to the Appalachicola.) 




91 Looeilude 89 Weet 87 from 86 Green»ioh tl3f 



Spanish and 'American West Florida, 1783-1819. (The figures show date of 
acquisition by the United States.) 



AND THE CLAIM TO TEXAS 377 

ernor at New Orleans to take military possession as far 
as to the Perdido, and Congress then annexed the district 
to the Territory of New Orleans. 

Madison tried to justify this robbery of a friendly power 
by pretending to fear that England might seize the terri- 
tory if we did not (a convenient pretext used by our gov- 
ernment more than once since to cover land grabs) ; but, 
unhappily, recent research proves beyond dispute that the 
whole rising had been inspired from New Orleans in accord- 
ance with instructions from Washington ^ — a precedent fol- 
lowed more openly once since by a more strenuous admin- 
istration in its desire for foreign territory. 

As settlement poured into the Mississippi Territory, 
West Florida certainly became worth far more to us than 
it was to Spain. It lay, a narrow strip, between us and our 
natural coast line. It held the mouths of our rivers and the 
harbors of our commerce, while to Spain it meant nothing 
except the chance to limit our power. If the two countries 
had been individuals, Spain would have been morally bound 
to sell at a fair price ; but any court would have defended 
her title, if, immorally, she insisted upon annoying her 
neighbor by keeping possession. Between two nations, as 
matters went in that immoral day, it was inevitable that we 
should get the district, — if not by fair bargaining, then by 
open force. The unfortunate thing is that the actual pro- 
cedure was such a needless and inextricable mixture of 
violence and deceit. 

The Texas question also first saw the light in connection 
with the Louisiana Purchase. The boundary between 
Louisiana and Mexico had never been defined, origin of 
Napoleon's instructions to Laussat placed the the Texas 
dividing line at the Rio Grande. If that was ^1"®^*'°° 
correct, we had bought Texas. But Spain protested that 
the proper boundary was the Sabine. The question was 
complicated ; we cared little about it at the time ; the 
territory was a wilderness, without White inhabitants ex- 

^ American Historical Association Reports for 1911. 



378 



JEFFERSON'S ADMINISTRATION 



cept at a few Spanish missions ; and in 1819 we surrendered 
all claim to Texas as part of the price we paid for East 
Florida, which we were then buying from Spain. 



III. WESTERN EXPLORATION 

Jefferson had long manifested a scientific interest in 
"delineating the arteries of the continent." In 1783 he had 
urged George Rogers Clark 
Jefferson's ^o explore the West 
zeal for to the Pacific ; and 

exploration ^j^^^^ ^^^^^ j^^^^^ 

while in France, he had per- 
suaded Ledyard, an Ameri- 
can traveler, to attempt to 
reach the Pacific coast of 
America by way of Siberia 
and the ocean. There must 
be a great river, he argued, 
flowing from the western 
mountains into the Pacific, 
rising near the head waters 
of the Missouri. The ex- 
plorer could ascend this 
stream and descend the Mis- 
souri to St. Louis. 

Ledyard was turned back 
by suspicious Russian offi- 
ciaimsto cials. But in 1792 
Oregon Captain Gray of 
Boston, in his ship Columbia, 
discovered the mouth of the 
prophesied river, and named 
it for his vessel. This was 
our first basis for future claim 
to the Oregon country. As 
soon as Jefferson became President, he secured from Con- 
gress an appropriation for an exploring expedition to that 




Meriwether Lewis. From Winsor's 
Narrative and Critical History, after a 
contemporary drawing among the pos- 
sessions of Captain Clark, Lewis' Com- 
panion. This is the only known like- 
ness of the explorer. 



^^ 



^iX&^Mr>; 




THE LEWIS AND CLARK EXPEDITION 379 

country, to be led by. Meriwether Lewis (Jefferson's private 
secretary) and Captain William Clark (a brother of George 
Rogers Clark). Before the expedition was ready, the pur- 
chase of Louisiana made much of the territory to be explored 
our own, and gave us possessions contiguous to the un- 
occupied and almost unclaimed Oregon district. 

Lewis and Clark set out from St. Louis with thirty-five 
men, in the spring of 1804. Sixteen hundred miles up the 
Missouri, near the modern Bismarck, they wintered among 
the Mandan Indians. The next spring, guided by the 
"Bird Woman" with her papoose on her back, they con- 
tinued up the river to the water shed, and followed streams 
down the western slope until they found a mighty river. 
When they reached its mouth in November, four thousand 
miles from St. Louis, this river proved to be Captain Gray's 
Columbia. This exploration was the second basis for Ameri- 
can claim to Oregon; and the scientific observations, maps, 
and journals of the expedition revealed a vast region never 
before known to White men. 

In 1811 Astoria was founded on the south bank of the 
Columbia, by John Jacob Astor, as a station for the fur 
trade. This occupation by American citizens made a third 
basis for a claim to the country. 

Unhappily, when the United States sought to establish 
its claim, a few years later (p. 406), the government tried 
to strengthen its case by holding that Oregon was part of 
the Louisiana Purchase. There was really no ground what- 
ever for arguing that "Louisiana" ever extended beyond 
the Rocky Mountains ; but the government maps kept 
up the pretense until 1901. 



CHAPTER XXI 

THE WAR OF 1812 

The foreign relations of the United States from 1806 
to 1812 were disgraceful. After brief truce, the European 
Foreign ^^^ began again in 1803, and the commercial 
relations, clauses of the Jay treaty expired soon after. 
1806-1812 Napoleon was soon master of the continent, with 
all the coast line from Italy to Denmark. His sole antago- 
nist, England, ruled supreme on the sea. The only neutral 
power with any shipping interests was the United States. 
That shipping fattened on its monopoly ; but each of the 
mighty combatants strove to force it into an ally, and to 
prevent its aiding his foe. English "Order in Council" 
followed French "Decree"; and whatever American ship- 
ping the one did not declare subject to capture, the other 
did. Meantime, our own government lacked decision to 
take sides, or power to defend its citizens. 

The story is not a pleasant one. It is a tale of outrageous 
robbery by both European powers, and of American vacil- 
lation and disgrace. Jefferson and Madison, great in peace, 
were not suited for emergencies of this kind. Well-meaning, 
gentle, trustful, not particularly decisive, they were buffeted 
pitifully back and forth between tjie arrogance and indiffer- 
ence of English Pitt and Canning, and the duplicity and 
insolent greed of French Napoleon and Talleyrand. 

If war is ever justifiable for any provocation short of 
armed invasion, we had abundant cause to fight both coun- 
tries or either, at any time between 1806 and 1810. Our 
government shilly-shallied, in impotent indecision, until 
the energetic part of the nation rose wrathfully to demand 
that we fight some one at once to win back self-respect. 
Then we chose the wrong time and, apparently, the wrong 

380 



ENGLISH "ORDERS" AND FRENCH " DECREES ' 381 

foe. Unfortunately, too, our choice of a foe arrayed us on 
the side of the European despot against the only hope for 
European freedom. The rise of Napoleon had reversed the 
position of England and France, as compared with that 
of 1793. Says Professor Hart (Foundations of American 
Foreign Policy, 27): "The United States waited till the 
European system . . . was on the point of falling to pieces 
of its own weight, and then made war on the power which, 
on the whole, had done us the least harm." To the same 
effect Professor Channing says (Jeffersonian System, 200) : 

"... The intention of the English government seems to 
have been to treat the neutral fairly, to give him ample warning, 
and to mitigate his losses by permitting him to seek another 
destination for his cargo. The French administration of the 
decrees was peculiarly harsh and unjust. ... In short the French 
seemed to have acted with the least consideration for the rights 
of neutrals; but the English confiscated so many more neutral 
vessels, owing to the activity and strength of their cruisers and 
privateers, that the greater hostility was aroused against the 
British." 

To complicate the picture further, that section of the 
country immediately interested — the section whose ships 
were being confiscated and sailors impressed — Growth of 
did not want war at any time, certainly not J^®^ ^°S" 
with England, and talked freely of preferring merce, 
secession from the Union. In 1790, before the i793-i8io 
wars of the French Revolution began, 550 English mer- 
chant ships entered American harbors. In 1799, when 
the first series of wars closed, the number had sunk to 
100. Meantime, New England shipping had increased five- 
fold. During the second series of wars, — until America 
itself became engaged, — American shipping continued to 
absorb the former English carrying trade with the world. 
Between 1803 and 1812, England seized a thousand Ameri- 
can merchantmen, — many of them very properly, for viola- 
tions of recognized principles of international law ; and 
France captured more than half that number, — the greater 



382 THE WAR OF 1812 

part treacherously, after inviting them into continental 
harbors by special proclamation. But New England was 
willing to submit to all this, and to the impressment of 
her seamen, rather than lose her golden harvest of the seas. 

Jefferson's second administration spent its chief energy 
in trying to maintain a policy of commercial non-intercourse 
The em- with the warring powers, in order to compel them 
bargo of to respect our neutral rights. In 1807, to make 
the policy effective. Congress decreed an embargo 
upon all American shipping bound for foreign ports — and 
no time limit was specified in the law. This was not a 
measure preparatory to war : it was war in commercial 
form. 

The embargo caused great distress among workingmen and 
commercial classes in England, but those classes then had no 
voice in the English government. The landed aristocracy, 
which did control the government, in death grapple with 
Napoleon, hardened its heart to the suffering of other 
Englishmen as an inevitable incident of the great war, and 
stubbornly refused to make concessions to America. Mean- 
while, the embargo caused hardly less distress at home ; 
and the outcry from sailors out of work, from shippers 
whose vessels lay idle, and from farmers whose produce 
rotted unsold, could not long be ignored by Congress. In 
New England, juries refused to convict on the plainest 
evidence, for violation of the embargo, and public opinion 
made it impossible to enforce the law. In the closing days 
of Jefferson's presidency it was repealed, as a failure. Its 
chief result had been a revival of the Federalist party in 
New England. 

Jefferson had wished his lieutenant, Madison, to suc- 
ceed him, and in 1808 Madison was elected by a vote of 
The election three to One. Backed by the "Old Republicans," 
of Madison he tried still to preserve peace by slight modifica- 
tions of Jefferson's peace policy. But by 1810 
real control had passed to a new generation of statesmen, 
younger and more aggressive, led by Henry Clay of Ken- 
tucky and John C. Calhoun of South Carolina. These 



"MR. MADISON'S WAR" 383 

"Young Republicans," or "War Hawks," finally brought 
Madison to their side. It was charged that Madison yielded 
to secure necessary War Hawk support for his re- 
election in 1812. Dislike for the war had strength- 
ened the Federalists, but Madison won by 128 votes (from 
South and West) to 89. 

The choice of a foe was easily foreseen. So far as inter- 
ference w^ith our commerce was concerned. Napoleon prom- 
ised to repeal his "decrees" — though he did not, our choice 
and did not mean to — while England refused to °^ ^ ^°® 
withdraw her "orders" until France should actually perform 
the promise. But against England a large part of America 
was in a state of chronic irritation for other reasons. In the 
far Northwest, the great British and American fur companies 
were fierce and ruthless rivals for territory and for control 
over Indian tribes. Rumors of bloody clashes and treacher- 
ous massacres among distant snows stirred every frontier 
community that sent forth its trappers into the wilderness, 
and the Western settlements believed, mistakenly but with 
savage earnestness, that every Indian disturbance was 
fomented by British agents. The West, accordingly, 
joined hands with the monied fur-trade interests in bringing 
pressure upon Congress. And in June of 1812 the United 
States declared war upon England. 

For three generations Americans held a tradition that we 
fought the War of 1812 in defense of "sailors' rights" against 
impressment. This is not a fair statement. Even The causes 
after war was determined upon, during the last of °^ **^ 
1811 and the first half of 1812, neither the government nor 
newspapers mentioned impressments as a cause. Madison's 
message to Congress recommending a declaration of war 
named impressments first among our provocations ; but 
never before had our government intimated to England that 
she must give up this practice or fight. Says Henry Adams : 
"When this grievance was finally taken up, it was an after- 
thought, when the original cause failed to unite and arouse 
the people. If England had yielded to our commercial 
demands, nothing would then have been said of impress- 



384 THE WAR OF 1812 

merits. . . . This worst of American grievances took its 
proper place as a political maneuver." 

Curiously enough, just before our declaration of war, too 
close for the fact to become known in America, England did 
repeal absolutely all her objectionable "orders" against our 
commerce. An Atlantic cable would have made impossible 
this blundering into war. 

The War Hawks expected to end the war in one glorious 
campaign of conquest. Said Clay, "I am not for stopping 
at Quebec, but I would take the whole conti- 
to " Mr. nent." But the country, as a whole, showed 
Madison's amazing indifference ; and New England, in par- 
ticular, persisted in looking upon the struggle 
as "Mr. Madison's war." A rich nation of eight million 
people could have put 300,000 men into the field (at the 
ratio of Northern effort in 1865) ; but at no time (not 
even when our territory was invaded) did we have one 
tenth that force for effective service, and, most of the 
time, the numbers were a half smaller still, — spite of 
bounties and other lavish inducements. 

Even more discouraging were the finances. The govern- 
ment imposed an excise and a stamp duty (hateful to Re- 
publican principles) and direct taxes ; but the States were 
delinquent in payment. When the government tried to 
borrow, its bonds had to be sold at ruinous discount. During 
the three years, the debt mounted frightfully ; and, toward 
the close, the treasury was practically bankrupt. In a few 
weeks more, this condition alone would have compelled the 
United States to sue for peace. 

In the first campaigns, the militia distrusted its inca- 
pable officers and behaved badly on several occasions. In 
The cam- 1814, just as England, freed from the pressure of 
paigns European war, prepared to push matters in Amer- 

ica, more efficient American officers came to the front, and 
we regained our northern frontier in two or three creditable 
engagements, like the Battle of the Thames (October, 1813) 
and Lundy's Lane (July, 1814), and Perry's notable victory 



AMERICAN SUCCESS AT SEA 385 

on Lake Erie. Then, in 1816, after peace had been signed, 
but before the fact was known in America, Andrew Jackson, 
with four thousand Western riflemen (deadly marksmen all), 
lying behind cotton bales at New Orleans, beat off, with 
horrible slaughter, a stubborn attack of five thousand 
gallant but poorly handled English veterans from Welling- 
ton's army in Spain that had victoriously withstood Na- 
poleon's best soldiers. 

On sea, America did win renown. True, no injury to Eng- 
land's power was inflicted. England had a thousand war- 
ships, two hundred of them larger than any one of The war 
our seventeen vessels ; and, before the end of the °^ ^^^ ^®^ 
war, every American warship was sunk or blocked up in 
harbor. But, meantime, in numerous ship duels between 
well-matched antagonists, the Americans had amazed the 
world by a series of remarkable victories, and won even 
from Englishmen the reluctant admission that, ship for ship 
and gun for gun, we outsailed and outfought them on their 
chosen element. England lost only thirteen ships ; but her 
mortification was wholesome, and there was less talk there- 
after of Americans as "degenerate" Englishmen. The 
American victories " had little to do with England's power, 
but much to do with her manners." Moreover, a really 
serious injury to England's remaining merchant marine was 
inflicted by the multitudes of American privateers, which 
snapped up ships even in sight of the English coast. 
Shipping insurance in England rose to double the point ever 
reached before in all her wars. 

One disgraceful episode of the war calls for mention. In 
1813 an American raid burned Toronto (then York), the 
capital of Lower Canada. A British force off our The raid on 
eastern coast retaliated by a raid against our Washington 
Capital. Five thousand troops marched triumphantly 
through fifty miles of well-populated country, drove a 
large body of militia before them in shameful rout, and 
laid the public buildings of Washington in ashes. 

A few days later, an attack upon Baltimore was repulsed 
by the militia. This was the occasion for the poem, "The 



386 THE WAR OF 1812 

Star-spangled Banner," by Francis Scott Key, a prisoner 
at the time on a British vessel in view of the attack. 

In the negotiations for peace, the American representa- 
tives (Gallatin, John Quincy Adams, and Henry Clay) were 
The Peace as superior to their English antagonists as the 
of Ghent English army had at any time been to the Ameri- 
can. In this field the Americans won a creditable victory. 
The Peace of Ghent (December 14, 1814) restored our old 
boundaries. It left all other questions unsettled ; but the 
return of peace in Europe had removed the occasion of 
trouble. 

The most serious peril from the war had been not in 
England's power but in New England's attitude toward the 
Federal union. During the whole period from the acces- 
sion of Jefferson to the Peace of Ghent there had been 
breathings of nullification or secession in that section, and 
at three times, in particular, such threats had seemed to 
have large popular support. 

1. In 1803-1804 the leaders of New England Federalism 

had been angered and alarmed by the Louisiana Purchase 

(which, they thought, meant an increase in the 

England political power of the South), and the "Essex 

leaders in Junto " ^ sought refuge in plots for secession. 

1804 . . . 

Pickering, formerly Washington's Secretary of 
War, wrote, after expressing fear of Jefferson (page 334) : — 

"How long we shall enjoy even this security, God only knows; 
and must we with folded hands wait the result, or timely think 
of other protection. . . . The 'principles of our Revolution point 
to the remedy, — a separation. That this can be accomplished, 
and without spilling one drop of blood, I have little doubt" (Letter 
to Cabot, January 29, 1804). And again : "If a separation should 
be deemed proper, the five New England States, New York, and 
New Jersey would naturally be united. ... I do not know one 
reflecting New Englander who is not anxious for the Great Event 
at which I have glanced" (Letter to King, March 4, 1804). 

^ Most of these leaders lived in Essex County, near Boston. 



NEW ENGLAND AND THE UNION 387 

John Quincy Adams broke with the FederaHsts at this 
time, and some years later he declared in much detail his 
knowledge of this plot, of which he strongly disapproved. 
"The plan was so far matured," says Adams, "that it had 
been proposed to an individual to allow himself, when the 
time was ripe, to be placed at the head of the military move- 
ments." This "individual" was Hamilton, whom the 
Junto counted on also to bring New York into the treason- 
able confederacy. But Hamilton frowned on the project, 
and the leaders found little support at this time in their 
own State. Thus this "first Federalist plot" never got 
beyond private letters and closet conferences. 

Hamilton wrote with contempt of the Constitution, — 
" Contrary to all my expectations, I am still trying to prop 
that frail and worthless fabric" ; and he agreed that the "dis- 
ease of democracy" was serious enough; but he did not 
believe that disunion would afford a remedy. He seems 
rather to have looked forward to a general convulsion, 
when a strong aristocratic government might be set up as 
a result of war. There is reason to think that he accepted 
Burr's challenge, soon after, to the duel in which he lost 
his life, only because he felt that a refusal would disqualify 
him for high military command in the struggle he expected. 

2. The embargo of 1807 prepared the mass of New 
England people for desperate measures ; and the years 
1808-1809 saw a popular movement for nullifica- j^^^ £ 
tion. December 27, 1808, a Bath town-meeting lands re- 
called on the General Court of Massachusetts "to the*^nf-*° 
take- immediate steps for relieving the people, bargo of 
either by themselves alone or in concert with 
the other commercial States." The meeting then ap- 
pointed a "committee of safety ... to correspond . . . 
and give immediate alarm, so that a regular meeting may be 
called whenever any infringement of their [Bath's] rights 
shall be committed by any person or persons under color and 
pretence of authority derived from any officer of the United 
States." Other towns took similar action, and the move- 



388 THE WAR OP 1812 

ment spread to State governments. Governor Trumbull 
of Connecticut declared the Embargo Act "unconstitutional, 
. . . interfering with the State sovereignties, and subversive 
to the rights ... of citizens." He refused the request of 
Secretary of War that he appoint officers to enforce the 
" Nuiiifica- Act in his State ; and in his address to the Con- 
tion" necticut legislature (February 23, 1809) he placed 

himself on the precise ground of the Kentucky Resolutions 
of '99 : — 

"Whenever our national legislature is led to overleap the 
prescribed bounds of their constitutional powers, on the State 
legislatures, in great emergencies, devolves the arduous task, — 
it is their right, it becomes their duty, — to interpose their protect- 
ing shield between the rights and liberties of the people and the 
assumed power of the General government." 

The legislature of Massachusetts, acting on this principle, 
prescribed fine and imprisonment for officers of the Union 
who should try to enforce the law in that State. Open 
conflict was avoided, and this second series of plots was 
closed, only when the Federal government surrendered and 
repealed the Embargo. 

3. The third distinct period of New England opposition 
ran through the three years of foreign war. For 1812-1813, 
New Eng- ^ ^^^ details must suflBce. (1) By unlawful and 
land and treasonable, hut highly 'profitable, trade. New England 
t e war merchants and farmers fed the British army in 
Canada. At one time the British commander there wrote 
to his home government, — ^"Two thirds of the army are 
at this moment eating beef provided by American con- 
tractors." (2) New England Representatives in Congress, 
with the full approval of their constituents, used every 
effort to defeat the bills to fill up the ranks of the depleted 
army. When a bill was under consideration to permit 
minors over eighteen to enlist, Quincy of Massachusetts 
exclaimed: — "It must never be forgotten . . . that these 
United States form a political association of independent 
sovereignties. . . . Pass this bill, and if the legislatures 



SEDITION IN NEW ENGLAND 389 

of the injured States do not come down on your re- 
cruiting officers with the old laws against kidnapping and 
man stealing, they are false to themselves . . . and their 
country." (3) The militia refused to obey the call of the 
President. In 1812 Madison, as authorized by Congress, 
called on the State governors to order out the militia to repel 
expected invasion of their own coasts. The governor of 
Massachusetts declared that neither invasion nor insur- 
rection existed (Constitution, Art. I, sec. 8) ; and the Su- 
preme Court of the State assured him that it belonged to 
him, rather than to President and Congress, to decide 
whether the summons was constitutional. Vermont then 
recalled her militia from service. 

In the closing year of the war, matters grew still more 
serious. The defeat of Napoleon had freed England's 
hands for more vigorous action against America, 
and this condition encouraged New England Feder- in New 
alists to enter on a definite movement for se- ?'^fi^°*^ 

mi r> .in 1814 

cession. Ihe nrst step was to have town meetings 
petition the Massachusetts General Court to secure a sepa- 
rate peace for that State. As early as June 29, 1812, a 
Gloucester meeting voted: "If a destruction of our com- 
merce and fisheries are the terms on which a confederation 
of the States (!) is to be supported, the Union will be to 
us a thread, and the sooner it is severed, the better. 
. . . We view the salvation of our country as placed 
in the hands of the commercial States, and to them we 
pledge our lives, our fortunes, and everything we hold dear 
in time." In January, 1813, an Essex county address to 
the Massachusetts legislature ran: "We remember the re- 
sistance of our fathers to oppressions which dwindle into 
insignificance compared to those we are called on to endure 
[at the hands of the United States government, this means] 
. . . and we pledge to you . . . our lives and property in 
support of whatever measure the dignities and liberties of 
this free, sovereign, and independent State may seem to your 
wisdom to demand." A typical address from Amherst in 
January of 1814 (Noah Webster presiding) pledged to the 



390 NEW ENGLAND AND THE WAR 

Massachusetts legislature the support of the town in any 
measures the legislature should see fit to adopt to restore 
peace, '"either alone or in conjunction with neighboring States." 

The legislature referred such addresses to a special com- 
mittee. This committee advised a convention of the New 
^jjg England States. The legislature, however, put 

Hartford the matter over to the next General Court, which 
Convention ^q^jj " comc from the people still more fully 
possessed of their views and wishes." The new legisla- 
ture resulting from this "referendum" called the Hartford 
Convention and appointed delegates. Connecticut and Rhode 
Island joined the movement, and New Hampshire and Ver- 
mont were represented at the meeting in irregular fashion, 
by delegates chosen in county meetings. 

Extreme Federalist leaders made no secret of their hope 
that the Convention would form a new confederacy of 
northern States. Gouverneur Morris wrote exultantly to a 
member of Congress: — "I care nothing more for your 
actings and doings. Your decrees of conscriptions and your 
levy of contributions are alike indifferent to one whose eyes 
are fixed on a star in the East, which he believes to be the 
dayspring of freedom and glory. The 'traitors and mad- 
men' assembled at Hartford will, I believe, if not too tame 
and timid, be hailed hereafter as the patriots and sages of 
their day." Pickering, with equal delight, wrote, "I do 
not expect to see a single representative from the Eastern 
States in the next Congress" ; and he advised the Massachu- 
setts government to seize the Federal custom-houses and revenues 
within her borders at once, and prepare for her own defense 
against either England or the United States. The Boston 
Centinel (September 12) announced that the old Union was 
practically dissolved ; and, November 9, with plain refer- 
ence to the Boston Chronicle's famous illustration of 1788 
[page 297], it announced that the second and the third 
"pillars of a new Federal Edifice" had been reared, — 
alluding to the fact that Connecticut and Rhode Island had 
followed Massachusetts in choosing delegates to the Hart- 
ford Convention. January 15, 1815, the Boston Gazette 



THE HARTFORD CONVENTION 



391 



Of a nnt, FEDERAL Enil'ICE reared. 

i.EQiSL.rruuE Of c o.y.vLCJicur. 

iMRTFonn, NOV. 7. 'I'he j-.ini Coimiiittcc 
of the Lcgisluturc ol" this Slifc to «iiym was 
referred the Cdmmmiicatioii irom the Guvern- 
or of Mnssiichuiftts,. have rep.jrioi at r.iuch 
l(i>gth ami with grc-it ability on the subjects 
comiectcii v.itli the objcc'.s of theii- mis;io:i. 
h\ conclusion the Committee say, 

" In wli.-it irianner the n.iiUi] littil'i-viU uSk': ■ 
fc?! Mill Tear, a'^e lo be renieilivil, is a ([uc ■ i : t 
hi.j'.ic!.t niumflll, an:l llf.-.trve'i tlii-irrtrst'--' err,. 
tion, Tlie dociimjiils tr.nnsmUu-.rby 1) , 1 \ : 
tlip Covcnmr of Mas-, iciaisetu, pres'-ni, i.i i,;. 

icm of tlic Coinmilict, :iii el ),'iblc nu-Umd i.; c^.i. 

iiij the »-i»r\om oC .'Ji w.ICngi luJ, m dcvi^ni^f, (in full 
consultation, a pi-opcr course to be adoptcii, ct.usi^- 
tent Willi oiip ublig-itions tj llie Uiiileu Sir>lL-»." 

They therefore rccomineiVl, llial Seven H ' 
egatcs from this Slate l>e appoiiiled to i . 
the Delegates from theConiraoiiwealth of M..-- 
sachusctts, and of any otlicr of the Xo-.v-I'.n;r. I 
laud Sti.tes, 3 1 Hart fore' ot the Ist'i Decem- 
ber, to confer with them on tlie subjects p;o- 
poS'.:d by a Resolution cjf slid ComnK)nvei;!t!i, 
and upon any other subjects which may conte 
before them, for the purpose of devi^in;; and 
reconiniendhig such iiuaiures for the safety 
and welfare of those States, as may in, is' it 
with o\ir obligations as merol'ers of the na- 
tional Unior'.. T'.:s report has been adoptol in 
both Houses, and the full'.-Hin;^ persons have 
b'ien appointed Dele-^'ates : — 

H;s irimrf:ii\t N'crv coodhigh, 

ii..'i, .1 \MF.s im.i.Horsi-, 

lion. JOirV TUr.AD'A FJ.l,, 
}t.,n. ;^K.iMI \V1\H ?\VI; I , 
JIfln. X \TII WIKi, '^Mi ril, 

ii.ih (; \L\ IN' <,ODi)\i::). 

I.'o.K l;.i(.r.l( ,M. SIIUIiMAN, 

Tiiint) ]*[u,Aii K.visF.n I ' 

ijy.isj, rr'j'ir.jy^ niioTtF.-rsL.i.yj) 

vi<i\M-i\yzy,-s:r,\. j. ().\ Tucsdav the Le- 
i';sl:.";ie r.f lliiw Stale convened in this to\v:f. 
His Escelloi'C; Governor Junf.s the san)cdav 
srnt ihcni a ini KS3"-e, r.-mtainiiit; a-a al)ie, ii - 
dcpendet;t and ii-te|li:cjent dcvi l.jpiine:,' fjf the 
• i'.i..-: ■, :.':■:.. N'aiional and State afTn^s. and 
c , . -J ■ ■ : 'o 'hem thcinipjitttt KcmjIh- 
!ii,: .. ' ( j:;.!ni',iilca',i<'ns of the (ji-ipi rior and 
I-cj^iiilaturo cf Massaclnuctu, on the su!>j:ct| l.npAic 




Photograph of Parts of Two Columns of the Boston Centinel for November 9, 
1814. The second column shows the New England pride in the achievements 
of the New England privateers in marked contrast with the ill-veiled delight 
at the reverses of the American land army elsewhere shown in the same paper. 



advised Madison to get a faster horse than he had when he 
fled from Washington before the British raid, — "or the 
swift vengeance of New England will overtake the wretched 
miscreant in his flight." 



392 NEW ENGLAND AND THE WAR 

The Hartford Convention met December 15, 1814, and 
remained in session one month. It talked State sovereignty 
and nullification. It blustered and threatened. As an 
ultimatum, it demanded amendments to the Constitution 
(which would have rendered the government impotent in a 
crisis) and the immediate surrender to the States of control 
over their own troops and taxes (which would have been a 
virtual dissolution of the Union). All its words and acts 
pointed to secession ; but it did not take wp the matter of actiial 
separation. Instead, it provided for a new convention, 
to be held a little later, and adjourned to give time for the 
New England States to negotiate further with the govern- 
ment at Washington. 

Then the unexpected announcement of peace brought 
the whole movement to an ignominious collapse. The new 
And the Spirit of nationalism, which at once swept over the 
Peace country, buried the Federalist party and drove the 

old New England leaders from public life. The rest of their 
years they spent in explaining to an indifferent world that 
they had not meant anything anyway. The peculiar mean- 
ness of their disunion movement lay in the fact that it 
was a stab in the back to the Nation already engaged in 
desperate foreign war. 



PART VII — A NEW AMERICANISM, 1815-1830 
CHAPTER XXII 

A THIRD "WEST" 

The war originated in blunder. It cost two hundred 
millions of dollars and thirty thousand lives — -^^^ •^^_ 
besides the incalculable waste and agony that go pulses to 
with war. It was conducted discreditably. And NationaUsm 
it was ended without mention of the questions that caused 
it. Still it did give a new impulse to Nationalism and to 
Americanism. 

For a while there had seemed serious danger that American 
frontiers might be curtailed. All the more buoyantly the 
spirits of the people rebounded into extravagant self- 
confidence at the boast, — "Not an inch of territory ceded 
or lost." The popular imagination forgot shames and fail- 
ures, and found material for self-glorification even in the 
campaigns. Once more we had "whipped England." In 
the years that followed, this exuberant Americanism was 
to be a mighty factor in the eager occupation of wild 
territory ; in attempts to extend that territory ; and in 
warning Europe to keep hands off this hemisphere. The 
years just after the war saw the "West" made over and 
greatly extended. (1) War- wearied Europe poured emi- 
grants upon our shores as never before, and our own people 
sought eagerly a refuge in the farm lands of the West and 
"Lower South" from the demoralized industries of the 
older sections. (2) These new homeseekers found homes 
readily, because the war extinguished Indian title to vast 
tracts never before open to settlement, and because the 
government now adopted a land policy more liberal even 
than that of 1800. And (3) there appeared new facilities for 



S94 MAKING THE THIRD "WEST" 

transporting the new home seekers to the land of new homes 
— in an advance in steam navigation and in a new era of 
road building. 

1. Immigration from Europe had been fairly uniform from 
the Revolution to the War of 1812, — some four or five 

thousand a year. In 1817 the number of immi- 
grants rose at a bound to 22,000 ; and the fifteen 
years, 1816-1830, brought us a half-million,^ — mainly from 
Ireland, England, and Germany. Most of these newcomers 
found their way at once to new lands in the West. 

This westward stream ivas tremendously augmented by the 

general demoralization of industry in the Atlantic districts. 

Return of peace in Europe put an end to New 

seeder's England's monopoly of the world's carrying trade. 

from the At the same time the new manufactures, which 

demoralized j^^^ ^^^^ |^^^jj^ ^^^ ^j^-j^ ^j^^ ^^^ ^^^^ ^^^ ^^^_ 

lish goods, were exposed to ruinous foreign com- 
petition. In the South, the great planters had been 
declining in wealth for a generation ; and the six years of 
embargo and war, with no market for tobacco or cotton, 
had hastened their ruin.'^ "Bad times" always turn at- 
tention to Western farms ; and whole populations in sea- 
board districts were seized now with "the Ohio fever." 
"Old America seems to be breaking up and moving west- 
ward," wrote Morris Birkbeck in 1817, while journeying 
on the National Road. "We are seldom out of sight, as we 
travel this grand track toward the Ohio, of family groups 
behind or before us." 

2. The Indian campaigns, in the long run, proved the most 
important part of the War of 1812. Just before war with 

England began, Tecumthe, a notable organizer and 

patriot, united all the tribes of the West into a 

formidable confederacy to resist White advance. General 

1 The next sixteen years brought twice as many ; and then the Irish famine 
sent us a million from Ireland alone in four years. 

2 Jefferson and Monroe were almost in a state of poverty before their death, 
and Madison's fortune was seriously reduced. Jefferson's home, Monticello, 
with 200 acres of land, sold for $2500, in 1829. 



NEW LAND AND THE STEAMBOAT 395 

Harrison attacked and defeated Tecumthe's forces at Tippe- 
canoe, a tributary of the Wabash River (November, 1811), 
while that chieftain was absent among the Southern Indians. 
In 1812 the struggle merged in the larger war. The Battle 
of the Thames takes its chief importance from the death there 
of Tecumthe ; and the Battle of Horseshoe Bend (in the 
winter of 1814), where Andrew Jackson crushed the Southern 
Indians, meant far more for American development than 
the victory at New Orleans. When conflict was over, 
treaties with the conquered Indians opened to White settle- 
ment much of Georgia, most of Alabama and Mississippi, all 
of Missouri, and half of Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan. 

The credit system of land sales (page 367) had not worked 
well. Optimistic pioneers had bought large amounts of 
land with all their ready cash, and had then found them- 
selves unable to make the later payments. In 1820 Con- 
gress abolished the plan, but began to offer 80-acre lots at 
81.25 an acre. One hundred dollars would now secure full 
title to a farm. Settlers who had previously made some 
payments on the credit plan were given full title to as many 
acres as they had paid for at this new rate. 

3. In 1811 the steamboat Orleans was launched on the 
Ohio at Pittsburg; and after the war, steam navigation 
quickly became the chief means of travel in the Develop- 
West. In 1818 W alk-in-the-W ater was launched mentofthe 
on Lake Erie. Two years later, sixty steamers ^^^^^ °** 
plied on the Ohio and Mis.sissippi, and others were find- 
ing their way up the muddy waters of the Missouri, be- 
tween herds of grazing buffalo. It now took only five 
days to go from St. Louis to New Orleans, and two 
weeks to return. A steamboat could be built anywhere 
on the banks of a river, out of timber sawed on the 
spot. At first, engine and boilers had to be transported 
from the East ; but soon they began to be manufactured at 
Pittsburg, whence they could be shipped by water. The 
woods on the banks supplied fuel. Some of these vessels 
were "floating palaces" for that day, — "fairy structures 



396 



MAKING THE THIRD "WEST" 



of Oriental gorgeousness and splendor," exclaims one ex- 
ultant Westerner, — "rushing down the Mississippi as on 
the wings of the wind, or plowing up between the forests 
and walking against the mighty current as things of life; 
bearing speculators, merchants, dandies, fine ladies . . . 
with pianos, novels, cards, dice, and flirting, and love mak- 
ing, and drinking ; and, on the deck, three hundred fellows, 
perhaps, who have seen alligators and fear neither gun- 
powder nor whisky." 

The flatboats and rafts slill swarmed out upon the great 
rivers from every tributary, and made a somber contrast 
to this picture. A flatboat was manned by a crew of six 
to twelve men. A journey from Louisville to New Orleans 




The National Road. 



took six months. Many boats did not go so far. When- 
ever the cargo was sold out, the boat itself was broken up 
and sold for lumber ; and the crew returned home by steamer 
— instead of on foot as in 1800. In 1830 a traveler on the 
Mississippi saw ten or twelve such boats at every village he 
passed. Flatboatmen, raftsmen, and the deckhands of the 
great steamers made, as Dr. Turner says, "a turbulent and 
reckless population, living on the country through which 
they passed, fighting and drinking in true 'half -horse, half- 
alligator' style." 

Only twenty miles of the National Road (page 365) were 
completed at the close of the war ; but in 1816 it received an 
The appropriation of $300,000, followed by others as 

National fast as they could be used. By 18^20, with a cost of 
a million and a half, it reached Wheeling, on the 
upper Ohio waters. Thence, at a total cost of nearly seven 



INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS 397 

millions (carried by thirty-four appropriations from Con- 
gress), it was pushed on to Columbus, Indianapolis, and 
finally to Vandalia (then capital of Illinois). 

From the lower waters of the Potomac almost to the Mis- 
sissippi, crossing six States, this noble highway with its 
white milestones spanned the continent in a long band, 
bridging streams on magnificent stone arches, and cutting 
through lines of hills on easy grades. The eastern part was 
formed of crushed stone on a thoroughly prepared founda- 
tion ; the western portion was more roughly macadamized. 
In 1856 (after railroads had superseded such means of 
transit in importance) Congress turned the road over to 
the various States in which it lay. 

The cost of the road — even the early cost of that 
part east of Ohio — far exceeded the original "five per 
cent fund " from Ohio lands. The road was a true 
national undertaking, paid for by national revenues. 
The fiction of merely "advancing funds" was long 
kept up, however, to dodge constitutional objections ; 
and the consent of each State through which the road 
passed was asked and obtained. 

For a time it was expected that the government would 
build other great lines of communication. The military 
need for good roads had been felt keenly during the 
war — when at critical times it had been almost tion of 
impossible to move troops or supplies. The West- interna! im- 

Drov6iii6nts 

erners, too, were clamoring for more national aid, 
and their votes in Congress were gaining weight. More- 
over, at the peace (with the renewal of the import trade) 
the national revenues became abundant. In 1815 they 
rose at a bound from 11 to 47 millions of dollars. Madi- 
son's administration now abandoned the old Jeffersonian 
policy of keeping down the army and navy, and in 1816 
raised its estimate of annual expenditure to 27 millions : 
but, even so, a large surplus was piling up in the treasury. 
The Message to Congress in December, 1816, renewed 
Jefferson's suggestion for a Constitutional amendment to 



398 MAKING THE THIRD "WEST" 

permit the use of this surplus in a "comprehensive system of 
roads and canals . . . such as will have the effect of drawing 
And more closely together every part of our country''' and 

national of increasing "the share of every part in the com- 
umon mon stock of national prosperity." Congress ig- 

nored the suggestion for amendment, but provided funds for 
immediate use. The charter of the first National Bank had 
expired in 1811, and Republican opposition had prevented a 
renewal at that time. But, in 1816, the new Nationalism dis- 
regarded former scruples. An act for a new National Bank 
had been championed especially by Calhoun and Clay. It 
had received almost a unanimous vote, and had been ap- 
proved by the President. One provision of the bill gave the 
government a "bonus" of $1,500,000 (for the special privi- 
Caihoun's l^g^s of the charter), besides certain shares in 
"Bonus future dividends. Noio Calhoun's "Bonus BiW' 
sought to pledge these funds to the construction of 
roads and canals. Calhoun urged his bill on broad grounds, 
finding sanction for it even in the "general welfare" clause. 

" Let it never be forgotten," he exclaimed, " that [the extent 
of our republic] exposes us to the greatest of all calamities, next 
to the loss of liberty itself (and even to that, in its consequences), 
- — disunion. We are greatly and rapidly — I was about to say, 
fearfully — growing. This is our pride and our danger ; our 
weakness and our strength. . . . We are under the most im- 
perious obligation to counteract every tendency to disunion. . . . 
If we permit a low, sordid, selfish sectional spirit to take possession 
of this House, this happy scene will vanish. We will divide; and, 
in consequence, will follow misery and despotism. Let us con- 
quer space. . . . The mails and the press are the nerves of the 
body politic." 

To the savage disappointment of the Young Republicans, 
Madison vetoed the bill in a message that returned to the 
And Jeffersonian doctrine of strict construction. He 

Madison's expressed sympathy with the purpose of the act, 
^**° but insisted that a Constitutional amendment 

must be secured. The next year, under President Monroe, 
Congress renewed its effort for national aid to roads. But 



ROUTES AND TRANSPORTATION 399 

Monroe, in his inaugural and in his one veto, took Madison's 
ground. The enraged Congress retorted with bitter resolu- 
tions condemning the President's position, but it did not 
venture to challenge more vetoes or to make trial of the 
dubious process of Constitutional amendment. 

For a time, therefore, the only routes from the seaboard 
to the West were the National Road and the Ohio — that 
river having been reached either by the National The routes 
Road at Wheeling or by the Pennsylvania turn- to the West 
pike from Philadelphia to Pittsburg. But soon two other 
routes were added. 

(1) Planters abandoned the "worn-out" tobacco lands of 
Virginia and North Carolina for the "cotton belt," — a 
broad sweep of black alluvial soil running through South 
Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, between the 
coast and the pine barrens of the foothills. To even the 
distant parts of this region they found access by land, 
through central Georgia, with their caravans of slaves and 
goods. Dr. Turner has pictured graphically the contrast be- 
tween the migration into Northwest and Southwest : here, 
the pioneer farmer, bearing family and household goods in 
a canvas-covered wagon ; there, the aristocratic, gloved 
planter, in family carriage, attended by servants, packs of 
hunting dogs, and train of slaves, their nightly The Lower 
campfires lighting up the wilderness. Thus the ^°"*^ 
Lower South came into being ; and the new aristocracy of 
the black belt soon took to itself the leadership in Southern 
politics so long held by Virginia. 

(2) Each year the Wilderness Road (now improved into a 
wagon track) bore a large immigration from Virginia into 
Kentucky. Part of this colonization passed on across the 
lower Ohio into southern Indiana and Illinois, or across the 
Mississippi into Missouri. Another part moved through 
Tennessee down the bank of the Mississippi to the cotton 

. belt, to meet the stream of immigration there from the East. 

This double movement through Kentucky (as Dr. Turner 
reminds us), with many other features of Western life, is 



400 MAKING THE THIRD "WEST" 

illustrated by the families of Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson 
Davis. The two boys were born near one another in Ken- 
Two West- tucky in 1809 and 1808. The Davis family soon 
ern types moved on to Louisiana and then to Mississippi, had 
its part under Jackson in the War of 1812, and became typi- 
cal planters of the black belt. In 1810 Thomas Lincoln, a 
rather shiftless carpenter, rafted his family across the Ohio, 
with his kit of tools and several hundred gallons of whisky, 
to settle in southern Indiana. For a year the family 
shelter was a "three-faced camp" (a shed of poles open 
on one side except for hanging skins or canvas) ; and for 
some years more the home was a one-room log cabin with- 
out floor or window. As in most houses of the kind, the 
floor, when it came, was made of logs split in halves and 
Abraham ^^^^ with backs down. When Abraham Lincoln 
Lincoln's was a raw-boued youth of six feet four, with 
^°" blue shinbones showing between the tops of his 

socks and the bottom of his trousers, the family removed 
again, to Illinois. Abraham, now twenty-one, after clearing 
a piece of land for his father, set up for himself. He had 
had very few weeks of schooling; but he had been fond of 
practicing himself in speaking and writing clearly and 
forcefully, and he knew well five or six good books — the 
only books of any sort that had chanced in his way. After 
this date, he walked six miles and back one evening to borrow 
an English grammar, and was overjoyed at finding it. He 
was scrupulously honest and fair in all dealings, and intel- 
lectually honest with himself, — and champion wrestler 
among the neighborhood bullies. He made a flatboat 
voyage to New Orleans ; clerked in a country store, where 
he was the best story-teller among the loose-mouthed loafers 
who gathered there ; studied law, and went into politics, — 
finally to meet his childhood neighbor, Jefferson Davis, in 
new relations. 

Shortly before 1830, a yet more important road was opened 
to the West. Thinkers had long seen the possibility of 
water communication between the Atlantic and the Lakes, 



ROUTES AND TRANSPORTATION 401 

by way of the Hudson and a canal along the Mohawk valley. 
Gallatin's plan of 1808 included such a canal at national 
expense ; and in 1816 and 1817 the Congressional The Erie 
plans for internal improvements, with this as one ^^"^^ 
object, failed only because of Madison's and Monroe's 
unexpected vetoes. Since national aid had proved a 
delusion, De Witt Clinton, governor of New York, now 
persuaded the State to take up the work ; and in 1825, after 
eight years of splendid effort, the Erie canal was completed, 
— 300 miles in length from Albany to Lake Erie. 

De Witt Clinton had been jeered as a dreamer of dreams ; 
and, in truth, the engineering difficulties for that day, and 
the cost for the State, meant more effort than does the 
Panama canal to the United States to-day. The ditch 
was forty feet wide. It had eighty-one locks, to overcome 
a grade of seven hundred feet. Before the end, the cost of 
seven millions appalled the most enthusiastic champions 
of the scheme ; but cost and upkeep were more than met 
from the first by the tolls (half a million dollars the first 
year, and twice that annually before 1830), while the added 
prosperity to the State outran even Clinton's hope. Little 
Buffalo became the main station for the vast fur trade that 
previously had gone to Europe by way of the St. And its 
Lawrence. Farm produce in the western counties results 
doubled in value ; land trebled ; freight from New York to 
Buffalo fell from $120 to $20 a ton, and in a few years, to $6. 
In one year the 20 vessels on Lake Erie became 218. The 
forests of the western part of the State were converted into 
lumber, staves, and pearl-ash, and their place was taken by 
farms and sprawling villages. True, the lives of these pio- 
neers were hard and narrow, and existence remained possible 
only by unceasing struggle, while the fruits of their strenu- 
ous toil went in large measure to enrich the East. New 
York City, the port for all the Lake district, doubled its 
population between 1820 and 1830, taking Philadelphia's 
place as the leading American city and securing more than 
half the total import trade of the United States. 

Pennsylvania now found that her recent expense for good 



402 MAKING THE THIRD "WEST" 

roads by land counted for little against New York's water 
communication with the West, and in 1826 she began her 
own system of canals from the Susquehanna to Pittsburg, 
— with a 42-mile portage over the Alleghany ridge. 

From the great highways, too, cheap but helpful "State 
roads" and private turnpikes began to radiate in other 
parts of the West. Ohio and Illinois lacked stone for 
road building, but they invented a "plank road" 
— long a favorite in those States. The trees along 
the "right of way" furnished heavy hewn planks, which 
were laid side by side on a prepared level surface of 
earth. 

The success of the Erie and Pennsylvania canals over- 
stimulated canal building. In particular, the new States 
entered upon an orgy of building far beyond 
road buLid- their means. Between 1825 and 1840 nearly 
mg in the gy^ thousand miles of costly canals were con- 
structed in America, — of which four fifths were 
either needless or were replaced soon by the railroad. 

The rapid growth of the "New West" through the period 
1815-1830 had never had a parallel in history. Between 
Unparalleled the admission of Ohio and that of Louisiana there 
growth }^ad been an interval of ten years (1802-1812). 

Now in six years six States came in : Indiana, in 1816 ; Missis- 
sippi, 1817 ; Illinois, 1818 ; Alabama, 1819 ; Maine, 1820 ; and 
Missouri, 1821. During the next decade the Western States 
grew at the rate of from a hundred to a hundred and fifty per 
cent, while Massachusetts and Virginia remained almost sta- 
tionary. Ohio in 1830 had a million people, — more than 
Massachusetts and Connecticut together. The center of 
population in 1830 was 125 miles west of Baltimore ; and the 
Mississippi valley contained more than three and a half mil- 
lions of our total population of thirteen millions, while a mil- 
lion more, in the back districts of the older States, really be- 
longed to this Western movement. Since 1800, the West 
had grown from a tenth to a third of the nation. New Eng- 
land's total population was only two million, and she had 



RAPIDITY OF GROWTH, 1815-1830 



403 



gained only half a million in the last decade (even including 
the growing "frontier" State of Maine), while the Missis- 
sippi valley States had gained a million and a half. Indiana 
in the decade from 1810 to 1820 grew from 24,000 to 147,000 ! 




Throughout the period, Virginia held first place as mother 
State for the new commonwealths both north and Virginia still 
south of the Ohio. Dr. Turner, whose New West the mother 
is so often quoted in this chapter, has some inter- 
esting figures to show the preponderance of Southern im- 



404 MAKING THE THIRD "WEST" 

migration. Of the Illinois legislature in 1833, he tells us, 
58 members were from the South, 19 from the Middle 
States, and only 4 from New England. As late as 1850, 
two thirds the population of Indiana was Southern in origin. 
Indeed, the "Hoosier" element was, originally, wholly from 
North Carolina. 

New England was populating her own frontier counties 
in Maine, and also, in good measure, the western districts of 

New York and the Lake region of Ohio. Her 
England SOUS did uot begin to come in large numbers into 
immigration i\^^ great Central valley until the close of this 

period. So far as they did come, they were from 
her western democratic farming communities. They kept 
much of the old Puritan seriousness and moral earnest- 
ness, mingled with a radicalism like that of original Puritans 
of the Roger Williams type. They were reformers and 
" come-outers " in religion and politics and society. Tem- 
perance movements, Mormonism, Abolitionism, Bible so- 
cieties. Spiritualism, Anti-masonry, schools and colleges, 
when such things came in the West, all found their chief 
support from this element of the population. 



CHAPTER XXIII 

FOREIGN RELATIONS, 1815-1830 

From Waterloo to the Crimean War (1815-1854), Europe 
had no general war. This made it easier for the United 
States to withdraw from European entanglements ; ^j^^ 
and, with one great exception (page 407), our Northern 
foreign questions were concerned mainly with un- °"° "^ 
settled boundaries. The Treaty of 1783 had drawn our 
northern boundary from the Lake of the Woods "due 
west" to the Mississippi. But Pike's exploration^ had 
made clear that the Mississippi rose almost "due south" 
of that lake. Moreover, the line between the Louisiana 
Province and the British Possessions had never been de- 
termined. The Treaty of Ghent referred the matter to in- 
quiry by a mixed commission; and the "Convention of 
1818" between England and the United States fixed the 
boundary at the 49th parallel from the Lake of the Woods 
to the "Stony Mountains." 

A still more important "Convention" the preceding year 
(also provided for in the Treaty) had made a vast gain for 
humanity. The two nations agreed that neither . 
should keep armed vessels (except revenue cutters) ment " on 
on the Great Lakes. This humane and sensible ^J^^. *^''®** 

, IT Lakes 

arrangement is the nearest approach to disarma- 
ment yet reached by international agreement. For the 
century since, in striking contrast to the constant threat 
of all European frontiers with their frowning fortresses 
crowded with hostile-minded soldiery, Canada and the 

' In 1805 Jefferson had, for a second time, made part of the small army use- 
ful in the interest of scientific exploration : Lieutenant Zebulon Pike, with a small 
company, traced the Mississippi from St. Louis to its source, and afterward ex- 
plored the headwaters of the Arkansas and Red rivers (map after page 378). 

405 



406 FOREIGN RELATIONS, 1815-1830 

United States have smiled in constant friendliness across 
the peaceful waters that unite our lands. 

Oregon at this time was an indefinite territory between 
Spanish California and Russian Alaska. No bounds had 
Claims to really been drawn for any one of these three 
Oregon regions. The American basis for claiming Oregon 
has been stated (page 379) . Russia and Spain both claimed 
it because of their adjacent possessions. More serious were 
England's claims. Like all the claimants, England had 
territory adjacent to this "no man's land" ; like the United 
States, she needed, through that land, an opening on 
the Pacific from her inland territory ; and she had other 
titles corresponding closely to our own. To leave out 
of account the ancient discovery by Captain Cook, Van- 
couver had explored the coast in an English vessel in 
1792, just before Gray sailed into the mouth of the Colum- 
bia. The year following, Alexander McKenzie, in the 
employ of the Hudson Bay Company, reached the region 
overland from Canada. Then during the War of 1812, 
Hudson Bay officers seized Astoria, and England now had 
possession. 

But in the negotiations with England in 1818 John 
Quincy Adams (Monroe's Secretary of State) put forward 
emphatic claim to the whole Oregon district. The "Con- 
vention" postponed settlement of the question, leaving the 
territory open for ten years to occupation by both parties. 
Then, in the Florida treaty of 1819-1821, Adams secured 
from Spain a waiver of any claim she might have had north 
of the 42d parallel (map facing page 371). We looked upon 
this "quitclaim" from Spain as an acknowledgment that 
Oregon belonged to the United States. 

Thus the matter rested. In 1828 the agreement with 
England for joint occupation was renewed, subject to a year's 
And Eastern notice by either country. The debates in Con- 
indifiference gpess showed that body rather indifferent to the 
matter. The predominant feeling was that we could never 
occupy so inaccessible and "barren" a region, and ought 
not to if we could. There were enthusiastic Westerners, 



THE MONROE DOCTRINE 407 

however, whose robust faith foresaw (with the great Secre- 
tary of State) that in a few years Oregon would be nearer 
Washington than St. Louis had been a generation earher, 
and that it was to make our indispensable gateway to the 
Western ocean and the lands of the Orient, — "the long- 
sought road to India." Said Senator Benton of Missouri, 
in an impassioned oration, reproaching Eastern indifference, 
"It is time that Western men had some share in the des- 
tinies of this Republic." 

In 1821-1823 two foreign perils called forth from the 
Administration the proclamation of the new policy, America 
for Americans. 

In 1821 the Tsar of Russia forbade citizens of other powers 
even to approach within a hundred miles of the Pacific 
coast, on the American side, north of the 51st par- jhe Russian 
allel. Russia had no settlements within hundreds peril in the 
of miles of that line ; and this proclamation was °^^ ^^^* 
practically an attempt to reserve new American territory for 
future Russian colonization. Moreover it would have turned 
the Bering Sea, with its invaluable fisheries, into a Russian 
lake, absolutely closed to all other peoples. The idea was 
peculiarly abhorrent, both because of Russia's . , , 

, . . , ,. , -r- ^ • 1 And the 

exclusive commercial policy (typmed in the proc- " Holy 
lamation), and because the Tsar was the head ^^^f'^'^l^ 
of the despotic "Holy Alliance," which at just 
this time was planning to extend its political system to 
South America and Mexico. 

That plan was itself the second peril. In 1821 the United 
States recognized the independence of the revolted Spanish 
American States and appointed diplomatic agents to their 
governments. But the "crowned conspirators," known as 
the Holy Alliance, having crushed an attempt at a republic 
in Spain itself, now planned to reduce the former American 
colonies of Spain to their old subjection. 

England stood forth in determined opposition. Canning, 
the English Secretary for Foreign Affairs, made four sepa- 
rate friendly suggestions to our minister in England that the 



408 



FOREIGN RELATIONS, 1815-1830 



two English-speaking powers join hands to forbid the proj- 
ect. President Monroe (and his unofficial advisers, Madi- 
Engiand's son and Jefferson ^) wished to accept this offer 
appeals jqj. allied action ; but John Quincy Adams in- 
sisted strenuously that the United States must "not come 
in as a cockboat in the wake of the British man-of-war," 
and finally he carried 



Presi- 
in his 
independent 




the Cabinet and 
dent with him 
plan for 
action. 

Canning acted first, 
and, in his proud boast, 
"called the New World 
into existence, to redress 
the balance of the Old." 
His firm statement that 
England would resist the 
proposed attack upon 
the revolted American 
States put an abrupt 
close to the idea of 
European intervention. 
The declaration of policy 
in the United States 
came later, but it has 
had a greater perma- 
nent significance. In 
his message to Congress, 
The Monroe December 2, 

Doctrine ^g^S, MourOC 

adopted certain para- 
graphs on this matter, written by Adams. These paragraphs 
were the first announcement of the Monroe Doctrine : — 



Thomas Jefferson in old age. From the 
portrait by Stuart, now at Bowdoin College. 
From 1809 to his death, Jefferson, in retire- 
ment at Monticello, remained a chief leader 
of national policies, constantly consulted by 
Madison and Monroe. He died July 4, 
1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the adoption 
of his great Declaration, on the same day 
with his old friend and rival, John Adams, 
with whom in the closing years he carried on 
an interesting correspondence. 



1 Jefferson thought the matter "the most momentous since the Declaration 
of Independence." England's mighty weight — the only real peril to an independ- 
ent American system — could now be brought to the side of freedom ; and that 
fact would "emancipate the continent at a stroke." 



THE MONROE DOCTRINE 409 

[1] With special reference to Russia and Oregon, — "the 
American continents . . . are henceforth not to be considered as 
subjects for future colonization by any European powers." [2] 
With regard to the proposed "intervention" by the Holy Alliance, 
— " The political system of the allied powers is essentially different 
from that of America} . . . We owe it ... to those amicable 
relations existing between the United States and those powers to 
declare that tve should consider any attempt on their part to extend 
their system to any portion of this hemisphere, as dangerous to our 
peace and safety. . . . With the existing colonies ... of any 
European power we . . . shall not interfere. But with the 
Governments . . , whose independence we have . . . acknowl- 
edged, uw coidd not view any interposition, for the purpose of 
oppressing them, or controlling in any other manner their destiny, 
by any European power, in any other light than as a manifestation 
of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States." 

In justification of this position, the message intimated 
also that we intended not to meddle with European affairs. 
We claimed primacy on this hemisphere ; we would protect 
our weaker neighbors from European intrusion or molesta- 
tion ; but we would leave the Old World without interference 
from us. 

The thought of the message was not novel. Part of it is 
found in W^ashington's utterances, and the best of it had 
been stated repeatedly by Jefferson. But the practical 
application, in 1823, gave it a new significance. From an 
"academic" question, it was suddenly lifted into a question 
of practical international politics. 

The message was thoroughly effective at the moment. 
England hailed it as making absolutely secure her own 
policy of preventing European intervention in And the 
America ; and the Tsar agreed to move north 250 future 
miles, and to accept the line of 54° 40' for the southern 
boundary of Russian Alaska. And the "Monroe Doctrine" 
was not limited to that period. It had been announced 
merely as an expression of opinion by the President. No 

^ This statement regarding the despotic character of the powers united in the 
Holy Alliance has, of course, little logical bearing upon intervention in America 
to-day by any European country. 



410 FOREIGN RELATIONS, 1815-1830 

other branch of the government was asked even to express 
approval. But the cordial response of the nation, on this 
and all subsequent occasions, has made the Monroe Doctrine, 
in truth, the American Doctrine. The only real danger to its 
permanence is that we so act as to inspire our weaker Ameri- 
can brethren with fear that we mean to use its high morality 
as a shield under cover of wliich we may ourselves plunder 
them at will. If it ever becomes probable that the sheep 
dog wards off the wolves that he himself may have a fuller 
meal, his function will not long endure. 



CHAPTER XXIV 

NATIONALISM AND REACTION 

From 1807 to 1815 the embargo and the war shut out 
European goods. This afforded an artificial "pro- xhewarand 
taction" for home manufactures. We had to use newmanu- 
up our own raw cotton, wool, and iron, or let them **^*"''®^ 
go unused ; and we had to supply our own clothing, fabrics, 
tools, and machinery, or do without. 

This new demand for building up home manufactures was 
met mainly in New England, where much capital and labor, 
formerly engaged in shipping, was temporarily unemployed. 
In 1807 New England cotton mills had only 8000 spindles 
in use (page 345) ; in 1809 the number was 80,000 ; and, by 
the close of the war, 500,000, employing 100,000 workers. 
Woolen and iron manufactures had not grown quite so 
rapidly ; but they also were well under way. The total 
capital invested had risen to about a hundred million dollars. 
Two fifths of this was in the cotton industry. 

When peace returned, it was plain that this manufac- 
turing industry, developed by unnatural conditions, could 
not sustain itself against restored competition. We could 
let it die, and permit the capital and labor to find their way 
back into other industries; or we could now "protect" it 
from foreign competition by law. To do this, we would 
place high tariffs on foreign goods like those we manu- 
factured. 

If we adopted this policy of "protection," we should pay 
more for the articles than if we let them come in, untaxed, 
from the Old World, where their cost was lower. But, it 
was urged, we should have more diversified industries, 
larger city populations, and so more of a home market for 
our raw materials and for foodstuffs, — and, after a time, 

411 



412 NATIONALISM AND REACTION, 1815-1830 

when we should come to do the work efficiently, even 
cheaper manufactures, because of the absence of ocean 
freights. 

The question of "protection " was not new. Earlier tariffs 
had been framed to carry " incidental protection " (page 308) ; 
and in a famous Report on Manufactures Hamilton had 
argued for a protective tariff. But all such plans had 
been for taxation in order to create manufactures. It was 
more effective to call upon Congress to preserve industries 
into which a national war had driven our citizens. 
for'eco- Moreover, Calhoun and Clay urged that America 
nomicinde- mn^i make itself independent, economically, of 

pendence „ c l • • J i 4.U 

Jburope. such economic mdependence, they ar- 
gued eloquently, was essential to real political independence. 
They took ground for America like that which led English 
statesmen in 1660 to favor the old Navigation Acts for the 
British Empire. The war had just given point to the plea. 
For the first time, too, the farmer began to call for protection. 
He had been raising flax and hemp, and had imported costly 
Merinoes to supply the woolen mills. Now that the textile 
mills had shut down, he had no market nearer than England. 
John Randolph raised his voice in almost solitary protest 
in Congress, in behalf of the "consumer." With keen in- 
sight, he warned the agricultural masses that they were to 
pay the bills, and that, in the discussion of future rates, 
they would never be able to make their needs and opinions 
felt in Congress as could the small body of interested and 
influential capitalists : — 

"Alert, vigilant, enterprising, active, the manufacturing interests 
are collected . . . ready to associate at a moment's notice for 
any purpose of general interest to their body. . . . Nay, they are 
always assembled. They are always on the Rialto ; and Shylock 
and Antonio meet every day, as friends, and compare notes. 
And they possess, in trick and intelligence, what, in the good- 
ness of God to them, tlie others can never have." 

The Tariff of 1816 was enacted by a two-thirds vote as an 
avowed protective measure. Revenue had become the inci- 



PROTECTIVE TARIFFS 413 

dent. Imported cottons and woolens were taxed 25 per cent ; 
and manufactured iron, slightly more. On cheap grades of 
cloth the rate was really much higher than 25 per Tariff 
cent, — disguised by a '^minimum-price'' clause, ofisie 
That is, the bill provided that, for purposes of taxation, no 
cotton cloth should be valued at less than 25 cents a yard. 
If the cloth was really worth only 13 cents, the tariff was still 
6i cents, or, in reality, fifty per cent. This effective device 
for placing the chief tariff burden upon the poorest classes 
was much practiced in later tariffs. 

These rates proved too low for their purpose. English 
warehouses were heavily overstocked with the accumula- 
tions of the years of European wars, during which the 
markets of the world had been closed to them ; and now 
these goods were dumped upon America at sacrifice prices. 

Moreover, in 1819, came the first world-wide industrial 
depression. Senator Thomas H. Benton describes ^^he 
the years 1819-1820 as "a period of gloom and "panic" 
agony. No money ... no price for property or ° 
produce. No sales but those of the sheriff. No purchaser 
but the creditor or some hoarder of money. No employ- 
ment for industry." Niles' Register, a paper representing the 
interests of capital, confessed in August, 1819, that 20,000 
men were daily hunting work on the streets of Philadelphia, 
— more than half the adult male population of that day ! 

The American causes for this depression of 1819 resembled 
those of later "crises." The promise of the tariff itself had 
caused overinvestment in factories in the East ; and in 
the West there had been reckless overinvestment in public 
lands by thousands of poor immigrants who were undulj?^ 
allured by the "credit system" of purchase. A third cause, 
which intensified the evil, was the recent multiplication of 
"wild-cat" State banks (after the expiration of the first 
National Bank in 1811), which had loaned money in extrav- 
agant amounts, and so had encouraged all sorts of specu- 
lation. When at length these banks found themselves 
forced to call in their loans, or to close their doors, they 
spread panic and confusion throughout society. 



414 NATIONALISM AND ITS REACTION, 1815-1830 

The manufacturing interests, however, ascribed all the 
depression to insufficient "protection," and the Tariff of 182. 'i 
Tariff of found its leading champion in Clay, who now glori- 
1824 fjpfj ^Jip protective policy with the name, the Ameri- 

can System. The chief opposition in debate came from Web- 
ster, who represented a commercial district in Massachusetts, 
and who took his stand upon absolute free-trade policy.^ In 
general. New England was divided, wavering between manu- 
factures and a return to its old shipping interests. The South 
had been almost solid for protection in 1816, but now it was 
solid in opposition, and it loudly denied the constitutionality 
of such laws. Slavery, it found, shut it out from the manu- 
facturing industry, and its agricultural exports could not be 
sold to advantage unless the United States enjoyed a large 
and free commerce with other nations. The tariff threat- 
ened to shut off such trade, besides increasing the cost of 
manufactured articles. 

The bill passed by bare majorities, through the union of 
the manufacturing Middle States and the agricultural 
West, which hoped to see a home market for its wool and 
hemp, — and which believed in "loose construction" be- 
cause it wanted government aid for internal improvements. 
Tariff rates, on an average, rose to about 33 per cent ; and, 
under this stimulus, the capital invested in manufactures 
trebled in three years. 

Clamor continued, however, for still higher protection ; 
and, four years later. Congress enacted the third great tariff 
Tariff of of this period, — the "Tariff of Abominations." 
1828 This Tariff of 1828 was engineered largely by men 

who planned to make Jackson President. None of the other 
political leaders dared oppose it on the eve of a presidential 
campaign, but they did make it an atrocious hotch-potch by 
amendments, — in the vain hope that its authors them- 
selves would refuse to swallow it. Said John Randolph, 
"This bill encourages manufactures of no sort but the manu- 

^ Webster followed the teachings of all "the Fathers," except Hamilton. The 
Revolution, in no small degree, was fought for the right to trade at will with the 
world. For a generation afterward, this fact gave a free-trade bias to our thought. 



A NEW SECTIONALISM 415 

facture of a President." Webster now changed sides, frankly 
assigning as his reason that Massachusetts had accepted 
protection as a settled national policy and had invested her 
capital in manufactures. New England and the South had 
exchanged positions on the tariff since 1816. The law raised 
the average of duties on taxed articles to -49 per cent, — far 
the highest point touched until the "war-tariffs" of the 
sixties, — and gave rise to a new nullification movement. 

The feeling for nationality upheld the Supreme Court in a 
remarkable series of decisions during this period. Perhaps 
the most famous case was that of McCulloch v. 
Maryland in 1819. Maryland had imposed a ruin- pj-eme^Court 
ous tax on the Baltimore branch of the National extends 
Bank, to drive it from the State, and had brought authority 
suit in her own courts against McCulloch, an 
officer of the Bank, to collect the money. The Mary- 
land court upheld the tax and denied the constitution- 
ality of the Bank — since the power to charter a bank 
was not among the "enumerated powers." McCulloch 
applied to the Federal Supreme Court for a "writ of 
error." That court took jurisdiction and reversed the 
State court. The decision was written by John Marshall. 
Three points call for notice : — 

1 . The title of the case would seem to imply a suit by an 
individual against a State — such as is forbidden to Federal 
Courts by the Eleventh amendment. But the State had 
begun the suit originally; and the Court held that in such 
a case an appeal by the individual was not forbidden by the 
amendment. This was the express point decided by Mar- 
shall in another great case, Cohens v. Virginia, in 1821. It re- 
stored to the Federal judiciary a large part of the power that 
the Eleventh amendment had been designed to take away. 

2. Following the argument of Hamilton in 1791, Marshall 
aflBrmed that Congress had power to charter a bank under 
the "necessary and proper" clause of the Constitution. 
Those words, he said, meant merely "appropriate." 



416 NATIONALISM AND SECTIONALISM, 1815-1830 

3. The State tax law was declared void because in con- 
flict with this Federal law. Before this, State laws had 
been declared unconstitutional only when in conflict with 
the Federal Constitution itself. 

Between 1819 and 1828, eleven of the twenty-four States 
had one or more laws declared void by the Federal courts. 
Opposition These decisions, however, did not go without 
by the vehement opposition. Political writers piled up 

pamphlets of scathing denunciation against them ; 
and half the States protested or actually resisted some 
decree. Virginia sought strenuously to have Congress re- 
peal the clause of the Judiciary Act that gave the Supreme 
Court its appellate power (page 306). Ohio, by force, took 
from a branch of the National Bank a State tax, despite 
the decision of the Supreme Court, and held it for six years. 
Georgia nullified a treaty made by the Federal govern- 
ment with the Southern Indians within her borders ; the 
Supreme Court upheld the treaty ; but Georgia threatened 
war if the government should try to enforce its rights, and 
carried her point (pages 468-469). 

The opposition to the Federal judiciary came from the 
South and West, and was merely one indication of a new 
Summary: Sectionalism. 

rndsr"^"" From 1800 to 1815, every suggestion of inter- 
tionaiism, fcrcuce with Commerce (New England's main 
1800-1860 economic interest) had called out threats of nul- 
lification or secession from that section. The pocketbook 
was stronger than New England's loyalty. 

The war created a new Nationalism. From 1815 to 1820, 
this force seemed wholly triumphant. It expressed itself 
(1) in demands for internal improvements, to bind the parts 
.of the Union together more closely ; (2) in protective tariffs, 
to make the country independent of Europe economically ; 
(3) in a new National Bank, to finance the government ; 
and (4) in the victory of "Broad Construction" along vari- 
ous other lines, — especially in a wider Federal control over 
internal commerce, of which space permits no discussion. 



THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE OF 1820 417 

But by 1820 this Nationalism had to contend with a 
reaction toward State sovereignty and sectionalism. From 
that time to the Civil War, political history is a struggle be- 
tween the forces of Union and Disunion. This time it was 
the South that felt her pocketbook in danger. She threat- 
ened to nullify protective tariffs because she thought they 
hindered her agricultural prosperity, and every suggestion 
of Federal interference with slavery impelled her into dis- 
union movements, because her leading industry rested on 
slave labor. 

One of the first manifestations of this new sectionalism 
was the struggle that resulted in the Missouri Compromise of 
18 W. Until that time a careful balance had 
been maintained between slave and free States in Missouri 
admitting new commonwealths. Vermont offset Compromise 
Kentucky; Ohio, Tennessee. Louisiana (1812) 
made the number of free and slave States just equal. But 
the free States grew much faster in population, and by 1820 
(even under the three-fifths rule) they had the larger number 
of Representatives in the lower House of Congress by a 
fourth. 

Missouri had been settled mainly through Kentucky, 
with many slaveholders among its people. In 1819 a bill 
for its admission to the Union came before Congress. The 
proposed State lay north of the line of the Ohio, which, with 
Mason and Dixon's line, divided free and slave territory 
east of the Mississippi. The North roused itself to insist 
on maintaining that same line west of the river ; and mass 
meetings and legislative resolutions protested against ad- 
mission with slavery. The South protested quite as vehe- 
mently against any restriction upon the wishes and rights 
of the Missouri people. The House of Representatives, by 
a majority of one vote, added an amendment to the bill, 
prohibiting slavery in the proposed State. The Senate 
struck out this "Tallmadge amendment,"^ and the bill 
failed for that session. No one yet denied the constitutional 

1 Introduced by James Tallmadge of New York. 



418 NATIONALISM AND SECTIONALISM, 1815-1830 

power of Congress to forbid or regulate slavery in the Terri- 
tories, but many Northerners, even, denied the right of 
Congress to impose restrictions upon a new State — so as to 
make it less "sovereign" than older States. 

At the next session of Congress (1820), the Maine district 
of Massachusetts was also an applicant for admission as a 
new State. The House passed both bills, restoring the Tall- 
madge amendment for Missouri. The Senate put the two 
bills into one, and substituted for the Tallmadge pro- 
hibition of slavery the Missouri Compromise. Missouri 
was to be admitted, with permission to establish slavery, 
but no other slave State should be formed out of existing 
national domain north of the southern boundary of Missouri 
(36° 30'). The policy of the Northwest Ordinance was 
applied to the greater part of the Louisiana Purchase. 

For the whole period 1816-1829, true political parties 
were lacking. The old Federalists had been galvanized into 
The " era activity in New England by the Embargo and 
of good the war ; but in 1816 they cast only 35 elec- 
^^^^^ ■ toral votes, and in 1820 none. The old party 
lines were wholly gone. Accordingly, the period has some- 
times been miscalled "the era of good feeling." In 
fact, it was an era of exceeding bad feeling. The place 
of parties, with real principles, was taken by factions, moved 
only by personal or sectional ambitions. 

This became plain in the campaign of 1824. Crawford of 
Georgia was nominated for the presidency by a Congres- 
The election sional caucus which, however, was attended by 
of 1824 j^gg than a third of the members. Legislatures in 
the New England States nominated John Quincy Adams ; 
and in like fashion. Clay was nominated by Kentucky and 
Missouri, and Andrew Jackson by Tennessee and Pennsyl- 
vania. Jackson's candidacy was a surprise and an offense to 
the other statesmen of the period. He was a " military hero," 
and, to their eyes at that time, nothing -more. Never before 
had a man been a candidate for that office without long and 
distinguished political service behind him. The campaign 



1 



NEW PARTIES AFTER 1824 419 

was marked by bitter personalities. Adams, whose forbid- 
ding manners kept him aloof from the multitude, was de- 
rided as an aristocrat, while Jackson was applauded as a 
"man of the people." Jackson had 99 votes; Adams, 84; 
Crawford, 41 ; Clay, 37. According to the Twelfth amend- 
ment, the House of Representatives chose between the 
three highest ; and Adams became President, through votes 
thrown to him by Clay, Adams afterward appointed Clay 
his Secretary of State ; and friends of Jackson complained 
bitterly that the "will of the people" had been thwarted by 
what John Randolph called a "corrupt coalition between 
Puritan and blackleg." (Clay challenged Randolph, and a 
duel was fought without injury to any one. Honor thus 
appeased, pleasant social relations were restored between 
the two.) 

The charge of a bargain was bitterly unjust ; but the 
Jackson men at once began the- campaign for the next elec- 
tion with Jackson's slogan — "Let the people j^j^^ 
rule." Adams was thwarted at every turn through- Quincy 
out his four years. In 1807 Adams had moved ^™^ 
the resolution in Congress that called out Gallatin's Report 
(page 366), and now, as President, his inaugural announced 
internal improvements as a leading policy, in opposition to 
the vetoes of Madison and Monroe. His first Message 
urged Congress further to multiply roads, found a National 
University, and build an astronomical observatory — "a 
lighthouse of the skies." But by this time many States had 
begun roads and canals of their own, and had no wish to 
help pay for competing lines elsewhere ; so Congress had 
become lukewarm even on this matter. The President's 
position, however, helped on the formation of new political 
parties. Supporters of Adams and Clay, standing for in- 
ternal improvements and protection, took the name of 
National Republicans, to indicate their belief in a 
strong Central government. To the Jackson men 
the campaign of 1828 was a protest against the undemocratic 
"usurpation" of 1824. Accordingly they took the name 
Democratic Republicans (to indicate their claim also to be 



420 NATIONALISM AND SECTIONALISM, 1815-1830 

the true successors of Jefferson's " Republican party ") or, 
a little later, merely Democrats. In opposition to the 
Broad Construction platform of their opponents, they soon 
became a "Strict Construction" party; but they won the 
election of 1828 before this question came to the front. 



PAET VIII— A NEW DEMOOKAOY, 1830-1850 
CHAPTER XXV 

THE AMERICA OF 1830-1850 
I. THE THREE SECTIONS 

In 1830 the Union had three great sections, — North, 
South, and West. But the Mississippi of that day was 
not "Southern," nor was Illinois "Northern." Both be- 
longed to the West, while "North" and "South" applied 
only to the divisions of the Atlantic States. 

The North Atlantic section was turning to manufacturing . 
New England used the water power of her rivers for cotton, 
woolen, and paper mills, building up a new line ^j^^ j^^q^^^ 
of towns (the Fall line) as at Lowell, Man- Atlantic 
Chester, Lawrence, Holyoke, and Fall River. ^®'^*'°° 
Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York got like results 
by using "stone coal" from the Pennsylvania mines, which 
were now accessible cheaply by the Pennsylvania canal 
system. In 1830 America still had only 32 cities with more 
than 8000 people ; but all but four of these were in this 
manufacturing region. The population of the new factory 
towns came at first from the old farming class, drawn in 
from the country by the lure of companionship and cash 
wages. But in the thirties these workers began to be re- 
placed by immigrants fresh from the Old World. 

The South had become statioriary in industry. Slave labor 
was unfit for manufactures ; so the water power and mineral 
resources of that district went unused for forty 
years more. The leading industry remained to- 
bacco and cotton raising. Southern society, too, remained 
stratified along the old lines. (1) At the top were some 

421 



422 THE AMERICA OF 1830 

GOOO families (25,000 or 30,000 people) of large planters, 
with numerous slaves, — sometimes a thousand to one owner. 
This aristocracy furnished the South's representation in the 
National government and almost all the higher State officials. 
(2) A hundred and thirty thousand families (650,000 people) 
owned perhaps from one to four slaves each. These small 
slaveholders, with about as many more non-slaveholding 
but well-to-do farmers, made up the yeomanry of the 
South, from whom were to come her famous soldiery. This 
class often differed from the aristocracy in political motives 
and aims ; but it lacked leaders, and it had no organization 
from State to State. (3) The "poor Whites," without 
other property than a miserable cabin and a rough clearing, 
outnumbered the yeomanry two to one. This class made 
the political following of the rich planters. (4) The 180,000 
free Negroes were hedged in by many vexing laws, and had, 
of course, no political rights. They could not serve on 
juries ; nor were they allowed to move from place to place 
at will, or to receive any education.^ (5) The 2,000,000 
slaves made about half the whole population. 

The Mississippi valley gave two more States to the 
Union in the decade after 1830 : Arkansas in 1836, and 
Michigan in 1837. The West continued to grow 
more than twice as fast as the rest of the country. 
Between 1830 and 1840, Ohio increased 70 per cent ; Indiana 
and Alabama, 100 per cent ; Illinois and Mississippi trebled 
their numbers ; Michigan multiplied her 32,000 by seven. 
In 1835 a line of steamboats began to ply regularly between 
Buffalo, at the end of the Erie Canal, and Chicago. Now 
for the first time, Neiv England had a fit road to the West. 
Her sons quickly colonized southern Michigan and northern 
Indiana and Illinois, and a little later they made the lead- 
ing element in Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota. In 1830 
Chicago and Milwaukee were still mere fur-trading stations. 
Pittsburg, with its 12,000 people, was growing dingy with 
coal smoke from its iron mills. Cincinnati ("Porkopolis"), 

1 There were nearly as many more free Negroes in the "Negro quarters" of 
Northern cities. 



OPTIMISTIC DEMOCRACY 



423 



in the center of a rich farming country, had 25,000 people 
and took to itself the name "Queen City of the West"; 
but it was the only place in the oldest Northwestern State 
with more than 3000 people. St. Louis, the point of ex- 
change between the fur trade of the upper Mississippi and 
Missouri, on the north, and the steamboat trade from New 
Orleans, boasted 6000. New Orleans remained without 
much change. The rest of the people dwelt in villages or 
on farms. Outside the aristocratic black belt, most of them 
lived in log cabins with homemade tables and beds and 
with rough benches or blocks of wood for chairs. 





kA 


^^ 


^k^l^ 




j^^^K^^f / 


St * * 


tS^W^'^^i^-^ 


^ 


- fv 


. ' ■-r'9 







Chicago ("Fort Dearborn") in 1831. From a lithograph of the Chicago His- 
torical Society, based on a contemporary drawing. 

The Westerners of 1830 had developed a new American 
type — to remain the dominant one for two generations : tall, 
gaunt men, adventurous and resolute, of master- ^ ^^^ 
ful temper, daunted by no emergency, impatient of American 
authority, but with a leaven of high idealism. The *^^® 
West believed in the worth of the common man. Already it 
had become "the most American part of America." Here 
the new nation showed best its raw youth, unpolished, but 
sound at heart ; crude, ungainly, lacking the poise and 
repose and dignity of older societies ; but buoyantly self- 



424 THE AMERICA OF 1830 

confident, throbbing with rude vigor, grappling uncon- 
cernedly with impossible tasks, getting them done somehow, 
and dreaming overnight of vaster ones for the morrow. 
Some small embarrassment it felt for its temporary igno- 
rance of books and art ; but it exulted boastfully in its 
mastery of nature and its daring social experiments, and 
it appealed, with sure faith, to the future to add the re- 
finements and graces of life. 

This "American propensity to look forward to the future" 
for whatever it lacked in the present particularly amused the 
Foreign many supercilious and superficial English travelers 
critics Qf ii^Q day. These prejudice-blinded gentlemen 

delighted in portraying, with microscopic detail, skin-deep 
blemishes of American society. Even Charles Dickens, whom 
America loved, saw little but the spittoons and the hurry at 
the lunch counters. No one of these critics saw at all the 
most amazing spectacle of all history spread before their eyes . 
a nation in the making, occupying and subduing a rebellious 
continent ; felling forests, plowing prairies, clearing the 
rivers, hewing out roads ; founding farms and towns and 
commonwealths ; solving offhand grave economic problems, 
wastefully sometimes, but effectively ; and inventing and 
working out, on a gigantic scale, new, progressive principles 
of society and government. "You can't write books," 
carped the visitor. "We're busy just now," shouted the 
West carelessly over its shoulder, "but just wait till we get 
this bridge built, these prairies farmed, that new constitution 
framed." 

In 1820 Sydney Smith closed his tirade in the Edinburgh 
Review with the famous passage: "Who, in the four 
quarters of the globe, reads an American book.? or goes to 
an American play ? or looks at an American painting or 
statue ? . . . Who drinks out of American glasses ? . . . 
or sleeps in American blankets ? " To this charge (which the 
next twenty years were to make stupendously ridiculous) 
the North American Revieiv replied with the customary 
defense, — the appeal to the future. This resulted in more 
ridicule from the English Review : — 



THE AWAKENING OF LABOR 4'15 

"Others claim honor because of things done by a long line of 
ancestors : an American glories in the achievements of a distant 
posterity. . . . Others appeal to history : an American appeals 
to prophecy. ... If a traveller complains of the inns, and hints 
a dislike for sleeping four in a bed, he . . . is told to wait a hun- 
dred years and see the superiority of American inns over British. 
If Shakspere, Milton, Newton, are mentioned, he is told again, 
'Wait till we have cleared our land, till we have idle time, wait 
till 1900, and then see how much nobler our poets and prof ounder 
our philosophers and longer our telescopes, than any your decrepit 
old hemisphere will produce.'" 

That the retort might not seem so amusing "in 1900" 
never occurred to the English humorist, — or that there 
was quite as much sense in taking pride in descendants, 
whom we will have some share in fashioning, as in ancestors, 
who have only fashioned us. Englishmen paid dearly for 
this flippant blindness by the rancor stirred in American 
hearts, — which unhappily persisted long after England had 
frankly confessed her error. 

n. THE AWAKENING OF LABOR, 1825-1837 

Laborin man an' laborin looman 

Hev one glory an one shaine : 
Evy tkin thcfs done inhuman 

Injers all on 'em the same. 

— Lowell, in the Biglow Papers. 

The democratic upheaval of the thirties, revealed first 
in the election of Jackson, was due, first of all, to the growth 
of the West. Next to that, it was due to the awakening 
of the labor class in Eastern cities. 

In large degree, this labor class was a new class, due to the 
recent introduction of new machinery, and new methods of 
manufacturing, from England. In the last quarter ^j^^ ^^_ 
of the eighteenth century, while America was wag- dustrfai 
ing her War of Independence, and while France was ^^° " 
giving the world her great social revolution, obscure crafts- 
men in England — busied in homely toil, puzzling day 
after day over wheels and belts and levers, and seeking 



4'26 THE AMERICA OF 1830 

some way to save time — had been working out the In- 
dustrial Revolution which was to change the daily life of the 
masses of men and women and children over all the world. 

In colonial times, each housewife spent all spare moments 
at the spinning wheel, drawing out the fiber of flax or wool 
into thread or yarn, one thread at a time. This thread 
was woven into cloth on the primitive hand loom, older 
than history. In America this weaving also was usually 
done in each farm home. In England it was done commonly 
by a distinct class of skilled weavers. 

The spinning was the slower work. One weaver could 

use all the thread that eight spinning wheels could supply. 

The weavers could not get thread fast enough ; 

inventions and in 1761 prizes began to be offered for inven- 

for textile tious for swifter spinning. Three years later 

mdustnes . , ,. i i i • • ^ 

— just when parliament was blundermg mto the 
Stamp Act — James Hargreaves, an English weaver, noticed 
that his wife's spinning wheel, tipped over on the floor, 
kept on whirling for a surprising time. Taking a hint 
from this position, he invented a machine where one wheel 
turned eight spindles and spun eight threads at a time. 
Hargreaves called the new machine the Jenny, for his wife. 
Soon it was improved so as to spin sixteen threads at a time. 

Then in 1771 (two years after Lord North had provoked 
the "Boston Massacre," and two years before he provoked 
the Boston Tea Party) Richard Arkwright, an English 
peddler, devised a new sort of spinner without spindles. 
He ran his wool or cotton through a series of rollers, turning 
at different rates, to draw out the thread ; and he drove his 
machine by water power, and so called it the Water Frame. 
The year after Burgoyne's surrender, or in 1779, Samuel 
Crompton, an English weaver, ingeniously combined the 
best features of the Jenny and the Water Frame in a machine 
which he called the Mule, in honor of this mixed parentage. 
With the Mule, one spinner could spin two hundred threads 
at a time. 

Two hundred threads seem few to us, familiar as we 
are to-day with machinery such that a man with one or two 



THE AWAKENING OF LABOR 427 

boys winds 12,000 spools at once ; but at the time the Mule 
made a revolution in cloth manufacturing. Now the 
weavers could not keep up with the spinners; and it was 
needful to improve the loom. On the hand loom, threads 
were first drawn out lengthwise on a frame, making the 
warp. The weaver then passed his shuttle by hand back 
and forth between those threads to form the woof. But in 
1784 Edmund Cartwright, an English clergyman, patented 
a power loom, in which the shuttle threw itself back and 
forth automatically. 

The next need was more cotton to spin and weave. Whit- 
ney's Cotton Gin (page 345) soon made it easy for America 
to furnish that. And, even sooner, Watt's engines began to 
provide a better power than water to drive the new machin- 
ery. Steam was first used to drive spinning machinery in 
1785. Fifteen years later, England was using more steam 
engines than water wheels. By 1800 the age of steam and of 
machinery had fairly begun in that country. 

The English inventions were soon known in America, 
but they did not come into common use here for another 
generation. In 1800 this country had only four steam 
engines, and only four cotton mills run by water. The 
Industrial Revolution came here sooner than in any other 
country after England ; but even here it did not begin until 
the War of 1812 made it necessary for us, for a time, to 
manufacture all our own cloth. 

With machinery and steam power, one laborer was soon 
able to produce more wealth than hundreds had produced 
by the old hand processes. This ought to have ^^^ ^^^ 
been pure gain for all the world, and especially it workers' 
should have meant more comfort and more leisure '*^^^ 
for the workers. It is not the fault of Hargreaves and 
Crompton and Cartwright and Watt that most of the new 
wealth went to a new class of capitalists : the fault lay 
with the imperfect organization of human society. Part 
of the increased wealth did go, indirectly, to the common 
gain, in lower prices. Every one could soon buy cloth and 
hardware cheaper than before the Industrial Revolution. 



428 THE AMERICA OF 1830 

But, even yet, the workers have failed to get their fair 
share of the world's gain ; and for many of them the In- 
dustrial Revolution has meant, not higher life, but lower 
life. Especially was this true when that Revolution was 
young. 

The new machinery was costly. Workmen could not 
own it as they had owned their old looms and spinning 
Capitalists whccls. Nor did they know how to combine so 
and as to owu it in groups. It all passed into the 

pro e ana ^^nds of "capitalists." The capitalist manu- 
facturer was a new figure in human society. He was 
not himself a workman, like the small employers in the 
old Domestic sj^stem. He used his money to build huge 
brick factories, story on story ; to fill them with costly 
machinerj^ ; to buy the "raw material" (cotton, wool, iron, 
as the case might be) ; and to pay wages to hired workers, 
or "operatives." The "Domestic" systern of industry gave 
way to a new Capitalist system, or Wage system, or Factory 
system. 

Under the old Domestic system, even in manufacturing 
districts like Pennsylvania, the workmen lived in their own 
homes, owned their own tools, and varied their toil (or used 
idle time) by tilling plots of ground about their cottages. 
Their condition was more like that of the farmer of to-day 
than like that of the modern factory worker. But as the 
Factory system came in, the worker was compelled to 
change his whole manner of life. He must reach the factory 
within a few minutes of the first bell, about sunrise, and stay 
until it grew too dark for work. So the capitalist built 
long blocks of ugly tenements near his factory, for rent; 
and his "hands" moved from their rural homes, with garden 
spots and fresh air and varied industry, into these crowded 
and squalid tenement districts, to live amid destitution 
Life under ^^^ discasc and vicc. The Factory system built 
the Factory up towns swif tly ; but thcsc new towns had no 
sys em ^^ water supply, no sewerage system, no garbage 

collection. Science had not learned how to care for these 
needs, and law had not begun to wrestle with them. 



THE AWAKENING OF LABOR 429 

Thus the new manufacturing society was made up of 
two hostile classes. Under the Domestic system, appren- 
tices and journeymen had expected to rise, sooner or later, 
to be "masters"; and at all times they lived in constant 
intercourse with their employers, who worked side by side 
with them, shared their hard conditions, and had a sort of 
fatherly guardianship over them. Under the new system, 
a particularly enterprising and fortunate workman might 
now and then rise into the capitalist class ; but, on the 
whole, a distinct and permanent line divided the two classes. 

The capitalist, too, had no personal contact with his 
workmen. He employed, not two or three, living in his 
own family, but hundreds or thousands whom he never 
saw outside the factory and whose names even he did not 
know except on the pay roll. There was little chance for 
understanding between him and his "hands." 

The men who owned and managed factories and banks 
and canal systems, together with a growing body of specula- 
tors and small money-masters, made up the capi- ^^^ 
talist class. They were keen, forceful, driving " Capitalist 
men, with few interests outside "business." Ab- ^^^^^^ 
sorbed in a mad race with one another for wealth and power, 
they had little sympathy or time for the needs of the two 
million "operatives" whose lives they ordered almost as ab- 
solutely as Southern planters ordered the lives of their two 
million Blacks. Like the planters of the black belt, too, they 
dwelt mainly in a small area — a narrow, curving band of 
manufacturing territory ; but through many subtle influ- 
ences, they held the faithful allegiance of the whole North 
Atlantic section from the Chesapeake to the Kennebec. 
They furnished the stocks and controlled the credit of the 
storekeepers in the small towns ; they endowed the colleges 
and built the churches ; they gave the best-paying em- 
ployment to lawyers. The farmers — lately followers of 
Jefferson — felt their prosperity bound up with that of the 
great industrial towns that made their markets ; and even 
the operatives .long voted unquestioningly for the system 
which, they were assured, filled their meager dinner pails. 



k 



430 THE AMERICA OF 1830 

Nor were any of these tributary classes consciously ser- 
vile. To most people in this period a "captain of industry" 
typified American success. He was the natural leader, 
honestly admired as a model for youth. 

This capitalist class early developed a keen scent for special 
privilege, to be secured through courts and legislatures. 
And special Especially did it take advantage of the generous 
privilege Americanism of South and West just after the War 
of 1812 to intensify the "protection" for its pet industries in 
the tariffs of the period. From this it reaped a rich harvest. 
Between 1820 and 1830 the output of American factories 
rose sixfold. In 1830 its value was a half greater than that 
of all the produce of Southern plantations — though the 
planters had an investment five times that of the factory 
owners. Since the factory workers got only a bare living, this 
huge factory output meant immense profits for the capitalist. 

Between 1800 and 1825 the mass of hired labor in America 
shifted from the farm to the factory. The factory oper- 
ative, like the capitalist, was a new figure. And, unlike 
the capitalist, he was a helpless one. He furnished noth- 
ing but his hands. Numbers of men wanted work ; and 
much factory work could be done by women and children, 
— especially in cloth manufactures, where it consisted 
largely in turning levers or tying broken threads or cleaning 
rollers. Until the operatives learned to combine, so as to 
bargain collectively, the capitalist fixed wages and hours 
and conditions as he liked. 

Carpenters and masons commonly worked from sunrise to 
sunset — just as farm laborers did. Those long hours were 
The long terribly hard ; but they were endurable because 
^*y they were spent in fresh air, amid outdoor scenes, 

in interesting and varied activity. But this long labor day of 
thirteen or fifteen hours (for much of the year) was now car- 
ried into the factory. There it was unendurable and ruinous, 
because of foul air, poor light, incessant, nerve-racking 
noise of machinery, and because there it crushed women 
and children. Hope Factory (Rhode Island), in 1831, rang 



THE AWAKENING OF LABOR 431 

its first bell ten minutes before sunrise. Five minutes 
after sunrise the gates were locked against tardy comers, 
not to open again until eight at night. A committee of 
laborers claimed that the employer stretched this horrible 
"day" by twenty or twenty-five minutes more, by always 
keeping the factory clock slow. The only respites from toil 
during the fifteen or sixteen hours were twenty-five minutes 
for breakfast and a like period for dinner, — both meals 
being cold lunches brought by the operatives. Arid more 
than half the operatives were children. This was not an 
exceptional instance : it ivas typical. At Paterson, New 
Jersey, women and children were at their work in the 
mills by 4 : 30 in the morning. The Eagle Mill (at Griswold, 
Connecticut) called on its employees, in 1832, for fifteen 
hours and ten minutes of actual toil. 

Lowell was a notable exception. No child under twelve 
was employed there; the day was "short"; and all condi- 
tions were unusually favorable. At 4 : 30 a.m. the bell 
summoned the workers from their beds. At five they must 
be within the mills, and the gates were closed. With a half 
hour, later, for breakfast, and forty-five minutes for 
"dinner," the labor continued till 7 f.m. The manufactur- 
ing company provided plain lodgings and arrangements for 
cheap board at $1.50 per week. Skillful workers (paid by 
the piece) might possibly earn twice that amount. The 
employees were almost all farmers' daughters. After their 
fourteen hours a day in the factory, these vigorous young 
women, for one generation, had energy for literary clubs 
and social activities. Churches and lectures arranged 
their meetings late enough in the evening to be attended by 
these eager working girls, — who also wrote, edited, and 
published a periodical of considerable literary merit. 

The working class were first aroused against this long labor 
day by a growing conviction of the need of schooling 
for factory children. In the Massachusetts legisla- of schooling 
tureof 1825, a committee on education sent inquiries ^^'^ '^^^ 
to the mayors and aldermen of all Massachusetts 
factory towns regarding hours of labor for children and 



432 THE AMERICA OF 1830 

opportunities for schooling. The rephes were as favor- 
able as shame, or local pride, could make them ; but no 
town claimed less than eleven hours of steady work per day 
for children (from six to seventeen years old), and only 
two reported so short a day. The "dawn to dark" day 
was frankly reported in many cases. Seekunk stated 
that its child operatives "work twelve hours; Some may 
get eight weeks' Schoolg." ^ Waltham failed to state 
the hours of labor, but said, "As much oppy for Schoolg 
as can be expected" (!) Bellingham honestly declared, 
"Work twelve hours pr day. No oppy for School except 
by employg substitutes." [This long labor day meant 
every day in the year, save Sundays, be it remembered, except 
in a few places where conditions made it more profitable to 
close the factories for some eight weeks of the winter.] 
Southbridge reported ''Average twelve hours. These chil- 
dren are better off than their neighbors'' ( !) Boston said con- 
cisely, "No Schoolg." Fall River, with unconscious irony, 
stated, "Work all day. There are good public and private 
S. and a free Sunday School." 

These horrible conditions show even more plainly in a 
temperate statement by "Many Operatives" in the Mechan- 
ics' Free Press for August 21, 1830, regarding children in the 
Philadelphia factories : — 

"It is a well-known fact that the principal part of the helps in 
cotton factories consist of boys and girls, we may safely say 
from six to seventeen years of age. . . . We are confident that not 
more than one-sixth of the boys and girls employed in such factories 
are capable of reading or writing their own names. We have known 
many instances where parents who are capable of giving their 
children a trifling education, one at a time, [have been] deprived 
of that opportunity by their employers' threats that if they did take 
one child from their employ, a short time, for school, such family 

1 The quotations from these replies are given from a tabulated summary made 
by the committee in its report to the legislature. The report seems never to have 
been printed until it was reproduced recently in the Documentary History of 
American Industrial Society (10 vols.; edited by John R. Commons, in association 
with four other scholars). Most of the other facts about labor stated in pp. 431- 
442 are based upon documents given in volumes V and VI of that work. 



THE AWAKENING OF LABOR 433 

must leave the employment . . . and we have even known such 
threats put in execution. . . ." 

In 1832, at a Boston convention of New England Mechanics 
and Workingmen, a committee reported upon the schooling 
of working-class children with much detail. The summary 
of that report runs : — 

" The children . . . employed in manufactories constitute about 
two fifths of the tvhole number of persons employed. . . . On a 
general average the youth and children . . . are compelled to 
labor at least thirteen and a half, perhaps fourteen, hours per 
day, factory time. . . . Your committee also learn that in general 
no child can be taken from a Cotton Mill, to be placed at school, 
for any length of time, however short, without certain loss of 
employ. . . . Nor are parents, having a number of children in a 
mill, allowed to ivithdraiv one or more ivithout withdrawing the whole 
— for which reason, as such children are generally the offspring of 
parents whose poverty has made them entirely dependent on the will 
of their employers, they are very seldom taken from the mills to 
be placed in school. ... It is with regret that your committee 
are absolutely forced to the conclusion that the only opportunities 
allowed to children generally, employed in manufactories, to 
obtain an education, are on the Sabbath and after half-past 8 
o'clock of the evening of other days. Your committee cannot,, 
therefore, without the violation of a solemn trust, withhold their 
unanimous opinion that the opportunities allowed to children 
employed in manufactories to obtain an education suitable to the 
character of American freemen, and to the wives and mothers of 
such, are altogether inadequate to the purpose ; that the evils com- 
plained of are unjust and cruel ; and are no less than the sacrifice 
of the dearest interests of thousands of the rising generation to the 
cupidity and avarice of their employers." 

Labor, too, had lost its old lever of free land. Near the 
Eastern cities, land was no longer "free." Even in the 
West the rage for speculation in land forced the real Labor and 
settler either to pay unreasonable prices to private *^^ ^^^^ 
holders, or to take undesirable lands, or to go far from 
markets and neighbors, — so that his life was more barren 
and his profits lost in the cost of transportation. 



434 THE AMERICA OF 1830 

Still the public domain in that vast section did offer hope 
to many individuals from the East, especially if they had .a 
little capital and much self-reliance. But such emigrants 
went mainly from the farm or the small village. The public 
domain did not much help the factory class. How should 
a penniless factory family get team and wagon for the long 
journey to the West.f^ Or food and supplies for that jour- 
ney and for the hard months afterward while the first crop 
was coming to harvest ? Or tools and seed to get in a crop ? 
How, indeed, should the man get the $100 necessary to 
secure the smallest farm the government would sell him, 
or the $1000 necessary for a simple equipment.'' Or, if he 
took the chance of "squatting" on government land, with- 
out paying down the price, how should he keep some 
sharp-eyed speculator from buying the place at the first gov- 
ernment sale — so reaping all the profits of his toil ? Pre- 
emption and homestead laws were still in the future, though 
both the West and the Eastern labor party were already 
calling for them. In the absence of such laws, the poor man 
from the East who sought a home on the public domain 
took heroic risks. 

Labor, then, must depend upon itself, and wage its fight 
in its own Eastern home. So the workers sought strength 
Early labor ^^ Organization. Labor "unions" had appeared 
unions, before 1800, but only for "mutual insurance" and 

® °^^ other benevolent and social purposes. The hint 

that such organizations might be used in class war seems 
to have come from the side of capital. Soon after 1800, 
the newspapers begin to notice "combinations" of capi- 
talists to raise prices. Then the labor combinations began 
to ask for shorter hours and better wages, and finally to 
"strike" for them. Between 1802 and 1807, New York, 
Philadelphia, Boston, and Baltimore (about all the cities of 
that time) had one or more strikes. 

A few progressive thinkers, like William Ellery Chan- 
ning and Horace Mann, saw that the labor question was the 
question of human welfare ; but in general the " respectable 
classes " long looked on all labor unions as iniquitous and 



THE AWAKENING OF LABOR 435 

revolutionary conspiracies. Like the old French political des- 
potism (page 13), so in this industrial matter, the capitalist 
classes held it proper that each weak worker should speak 
for himself, and that "no one should speak for the whole." 
In Boston, a "combination" of merchants announced in 
the public press that their "union" had pledged itself to 
drive the shipwrights, caulkers, and gravers of that city to 
abandon "unions" or starve, and that they had subscribed 
$20,000 for that purpose. (It is curious to note that Monroe, 
in one of his messages to Congress during the terrible panic 
of 1819, had congratulated manufacturers on the "fall in 
the price of labor, so favorable to the success of domestic 
manufactures." And Hamilton, in urging that America 
should develop manufactures, wrote with enthusiasm of the 
fact that in Great Britain four sevenths of the employees 
in the cotton factories were women and children, the greater 
proportion being children, "and many of a tender age" !) 

The attitude of the propertied classes was reflected in the 
courts. Here the unions found their chief obstacle. The 
courts promptly put down this first series of early Labor and 
strikes by punishing the leaders sternly for "con- the courts 
spiracy" — under the odious principles of the English Com- 
mon Law. In 1825, it is true, a New York jury destroyed 
the terror of such prosecutions for a time by awarding a fine 
of only one dollar for the "crime" of "conspiring to raise 
wages." But not till 1842 did any court recognize that 
workmen had the same right of collective bargaining as 
had always been possessed without question by employers. 
In that year the Massachusetts Supreme Court held that 
labor organizations might legally try to advance wages 
"by rules binding solely on members." 

Another obstacle to the early labor movement was the 
fact that all newspapers were bitterly and contemptuously 
hostile. The working class had no way to get their Labor and 
grievances or their program before the public. ^^^ ^^^^^ 
But in 1825 George Henry Evans and Frederick W. Evans 
(recent English immigrants) began to publish the Workiiig- 
mans Advocate at New York. Two years later, the Mechan- 



436 THE AMERICA OF 1830 

ics' Free Press appeared at Philadelphia. Then "unions" 
multiplied swiftly, and a strenuous labor war began. The 
twelve years between the founding of the first labor paper 
(1825) and the great "panic" of 1837 saw the first real labor 
movement in America. 

Later organization in this period had three stages. 

First each important trade in each large city organized its 
"trade association." These associations were local; and 
Labor or- ^^^ trade had no connection even with another of 
ganization, the same city. But in 1827 the Journeymen Car- 
1827-1837 penters' association in Philadelphia struck for 
a ten-hour day. The struggle was a stubborn one, and 
other trade associations in the city gave sympathy and 
some help to the carpenters. The strike failed. But it 
had taught the need of wider union among workingmen 
to gain their common end ; and the next year the many 
trade associations of Philadelphia federated in the 
"Mechanics' Union of Trade Associations.'" ^ 

This second stage in labor organization spread swiftly. 
New York had its General Trades' Union in 1831, growing 
out of a successful carpenters' strike which had been sup- 
ported actively by other trades. Like Unions were soon 
found in the remaining large cities. Such a federation held 
considerable authority over the several local "associations" 
which composed it. It usually maintained a Trades' Union 
hall, with courses of public lectures and a labor paper, and 
it took an active part in supporting strikes (when approved 
by it) from the general treasury and by public meetings. 

The third stage of organization came in 1834, when the 
various city Trades' Unions organized a national federation. 
This "republic of labor" held conventions in 1834, 1835, 
1836, and 1837 ; but the organization was imperfect, and in 
1837 it was ingulfed in the industrial depression that fol- 
lowed the panic of that year (page 472). 

1 Terms have shifted. The appropriate name. Trades' Union, has been cor- 
rupted into "trade-union" for the name of the association of workers in one trade; 
and consequently the more general union has had to seek new names, — such as 
Trades' Assembly, or Trades' Council. 



THE FIRST LABOR MOVEMENT 437 

Recent extension of the franchise had made voters out 
of the mechanics (page 453), and, from the first, the labor 
organizations turned to pohtical activity. On 
August 11, 1828, the Philadelphia Trades' Union, 
at a public meeting, recommended "to the Mechanics and 
Working Men of the city to support such men only for the 
City Council and State Legislature, as shall have pledged 
themselves . . . to support the interests and claims of the Work- 
ing Classes.'' The "Delegates of the Working Men," ac- 
cordingly, sent a circular letter to fourteen candidates for 
the legislature "to obtain your views in relation to the 
following subjects : — 

"First. An equal and general system of Education. 

" Second. The banking system, and all other exclusive monop- 
olies. 

"Third. Lotteries: whether a total abolishment of them is 
not essential to the moral as well as to the pecuniary interest of 
society." ^ 

Then, after a strong paragraph expressing the special 
interest of the working class in the first question, the circular 
concludes, — "If your views on these matters should be 
in accordance with those we represent, we request you to 
allow us to place your name upon our ticket." 

Soon, definite Workingmen's parties appeared in various 
localities. In 1830 in New York a " Workingman's party" 
nominated a State ticket. Its candidate for gov- Labor 
ernor got only 3000 votes, but three labor candi- Parties 
dates were chosen to the legislature, and Ely Moore (presi- 
dent of the New York City Trades' Union) was sent to 
Congress. In 1834, in far-away eastern Tennessee, a labor 
party brought the tailor Andrew Johnson into public life as 
alderman in a mountain village. And a Boston Convention 

^ "There are at present," says another address from the same source a little 
later, "not less than 200 lottery offices in Philadelphia, and as many, if not more, 
persons engaged in hawking tickets." Special complaint is directed at these 
"itinerant venders" who "assail the poor man at his labor, enter the abode of the 
needy, and, by holding out false promises of wealth, induce him to hazard his 
little all in the demoralizing system." 



438 THE AMERICA OF 1830 

of the "New England Association of Farmers, Mechanics, 
and Other Working men" urged 'Hhe organization of the 
whole laboring 'population"' in order to revise "our social and 
political system," hoping "to imbue . . . our offspring with 
. . . abhorrence for the usurpation of aristocracy ... so 
. . . that they shall dedicate their lives to a completion of 
the work which their ancestors commenced in their struggle 
for national, and their sires have continued in their contest 
for personal, independence." 

But no national labor party was formed. The old political 
parties began at once to bid eagerly for the labor vote, and, 
bit by bit, much of its program was placed in the statute 
books. In New York, one wing of the new Democratic 
party was especially friendly. This was the "Equal 
Rights" party, or the Loco Focos, who, like the labor or- 
ganizations, opposed all special privileges and the monop- 
oly of the United States Bank. In 1835 the Loco Focos 
absorbed bodily the Workingman's party in New York 
State. Soon after, the labor organizations in other States 
were lost in the fully developed Democratic party. For 
some years that party remained in large degree a working- 
man's party. When it surrendered to the Slave Power, the 
political labor movement received a fatal blow. The rem- 
nants of the labor forces made a leading element in the 
various Liberty and Free Soil parties (below), but the 
movement for a distinct labor organization did not revive 
until after the Civil War. 

The strikes of the years 1825-1837 aimed : (1) to raise 
wages ; (2) to secure what we now call the " closed 
Aims of shop" {i.e. to compel the employment of union 
Labor in labor Only, to the exclusion of non-union men, 
known even then as "rats" and "scabs"); 
and (3) to shorten the working-day to ten hours. But, 
in its political action, the Workingman's party turned 
away from these problems, vital as they were, to broader 
social reforms. They sought to abolish monopolies and 
lotteries and imprisonment for debt ; ^ to exempt a 'work- 

1 In the early thirties thousands were still imprisoned for debt each year. 



THE FIRST LABOR MOVEMENT 439 

ingman's home and tools from seizure for debt; to give 
him a lien on his work for his wages ; to make it easier 
for him to get a home out of the public domain ; to give 
women "equal rights with men in all respects"; and to 
establish a noble system of public schools — far ahead of any 
practice in that day. The closed-shop principle failed 
when the unions fell in the "panic" of 1837. Rights for 
women, too, had to wait long. The other demands were 
attained fully or in fair measure. 

1. This labor movement was the first clear demand in 
America that society should put ''man above the dollar." 
Forty years before, the makers of the Constitu- Man and 
tion agreed that the end of government was to pro- *^® dollar 
tect property. But the laborer now demanded, as a right, 
that the rich should help pay for his children's schooling ; 
that his person should no longer be seized for debt, nor his 
means of livelihood ; and that, when a creditor, his wages 
should have a first lien, ahead of other creditors' claims. 
These demands, disregarding the old "rights" of property, 
rested on the broad claim that they aimed to advance general 
human welfare. Many good people called them commu- 
nistic. But modern society has come to see all this as did 
the workingmen of the thirties. The laborer's wages, we 
agree, should have preference over the capitalist's profits. 
The one may add to the graces of life for the few : the other 
means life itself, and a decent standard of living, for the many. 

2. The demand for a ten-hour day, in place of the inhuman 
dawn-to-dark day, was long resisted by the employer class as 
though it would overturn all social order. When a ten-hour 
the carpenter journeymen of Philadelphia organ- ^^^ 

ized in 1827 to get that shorter day (page 436), the employers 
united in an address to the public, in which : (1) they com- 
plained of the attempt to "deprive employers of about one- 
fifth part of their usual time" ; (2) they "regretted" the for- 
mation of " a society that has a tendency to subvert good order, 
and coerce or mislead those who have been industriously 
pursuing their avocation and honestly maintaining their 



440 THE AMERICA OF 1830 

families"; and (3) they declared their united resolution 
not to "employ any Journeyman who will not give his 
time and labor as usual, in as much as we believe the present 
mode has not beeri, and is not now, oppressive to the workmen." 
The journeymen replied with an appeal for public sympathy : 
"Citizens of Philadelphia, to you we appeal ; with you rests 
the ultimate success or failure of our cause. Will you not 
assist us ? Remember we are men . . . and say will you 
combine with our employers to force us to be slaves?" 

The strike failed, as did several others in Philadelphia for 
the same purpose. But public sympathy was won for the 
cause, and monster petitions began to pour in upon the 
city government to adopt the shorter day for workingmen 
employed for the city. June J/., 1835, the city council yielded, 
and private concerns slowly followed this example. 

In Baltimore, too, the same year, a general strike estab- 
lished the ten-hour day for all business, public and private. 
But, in the Boston district, three great strikes for this 
object were crushed by irresistible combinations of capi- 
talists pledged publicly to force their employees to keep the 
old "dawn-to-dark" day. Success there, and in the rest 
of the country, came through the example of the Federal gov- 
ernment. Van Buren (Jackson's successor) had been closely 
associated with the New York Loco Focos ; and the National 
VanBuren's Convention of Trades' Unions in 1836 brought 
" ten-hour all possible pressure to bear upon him, during his 
°' ^^ campaign for the Presidency. In 1840, as President, 

Van Buren redeemed his promises. He issued a notable order 
directing a ten-hour day in the navy yards and in all "public 
establishments" of the government. During the next ten 
years ten hours became the regular labor day for artisans and 
factories throughout most of the country, though in some 
districts, especially in New England, a twelve-hour day re- 
mained the rule down to the Civil War. 

3. Foremost in the program of the ivorkingmen stood the 
demand for free schools supported by public taxes and con- 
trolled by the public will. In New England this ancient 



THE FIRST LABOR MOVEMENT 



441 



principle of the Puritans had been largely aoandoned, 
and the surviving public schools were much inferior to 
the private schools. In New York and Penn- 
sylvania (outside Philadelphia, Pittsburg, and our free 
Lancaster County), all public schools were pauper school 
schools — cheap private enterprises for poor chil- 
dren only, supported by appropriations from the county 
boards. The labor unions protested indignantly against 



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Time Card of Machine Shop in Providence, R. I., for ISIfS. From Ida Tarbell's 

Golden Rule in Business. 

the pauper school, and against any "class" school. They 
called for a "general and equal education . . . imme- 
diately under the control and suffrage of the people," not 
"as charity . . . but as of right," "for every child in the 
State, from the lowest branch of the infant school to the 
lecture rooms of practical science." ^ They anticipated 
also the modern demands for the kindergarten and for 

' These quoted phrases are all taken from two of many reports on this matter 
adopted by the Mechanics' Union of Philadelphia. They are typical. 



442 THE AMERICA OF 1830 

industrial training. The documents are too long to quote 
and too many to be even indicated ; but they are noble 
reading. One brief excerpt must suffice. In February, 
1830, a committee of the Philadelphia Mechanics' Union 
reported to a meeting of "the friends of general and equal 
education" a long and remarkable statement on conditions 
in Pennsylvania, with a draft of a bill to correct the evils. 
Three evenings were devoted by the meeting to discussion 
of the report, after which it was unanimously adopted. The 
report was widely copied in labor papers. It protests against 
the absence of all schools in many districts, the pauper 
character of such as exist, their limited instruction, and the 
absence of any attempt to supply a "judicious infant train- 
ing" for children under five. Their own bill, the committee 
claim, will extend schools throughout the whole common- 
wealth ; will place them "immediately under the control 
and suffrage of the people"; and "its benefits and 
privileges will not, as at present, be limited, as an act 
of charity, to the poor alone, but will extend equally 
and of right to all classes, and be supported at the ex- 
pense of all." 

Toward this call for free schools for the people, the capital- 
istic press adopted a tone of condescending reproof. It re- 
And the minded the workers that more education was al- 
capitaiist ready attainable by the poor in America than 
^^^^^ anywhere else. Much more could never he expected. 

"The peasant must labor during those hours of the day which 
his wealthy neighbor can give to abstract culture : otherwise 
the earth would not yield enough for the subsistence of all." 
And again, "Education . . . must be the work of individuals. 
. . . If a government concern, nothing could prevent it from 
becoming a political job.'' Many leading papers reviled the 
idea of free public schools as "Agrarianism" or "an arbi- 
trary division of property." And one editor deplores the 
taking away from "the more thriving members" of the 
working classes "one of their chief incitements to industrj^ 
— the hope of earning the means of educating their chil- 
dren." Indeed, it is hard to find any of the hoary argu- 



THE INTELLECTUAL AWAKENING 443 

ments, still furbished anew against every democratic pro- 
posal, which were not worn threadbare in the thirties in 
opposition to a free-school system. 

III. INTELLECTUAL AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 

Throughout the East in 1830, we have noted, elementary 
^public schools were lacking or poor. Their revival was owing 
first of all to the persistent demand by the work- Horace 
ingmen. That agitation prepared the ground for Mann 
the work of humanitarian reformers led by Horace Mann. 
Through Mann's efforts, Massachusetts created a State 
Board of Education in 1837 and established the first 
American Normal School in 1839. By such forces, a good 
system of "common schools" soon spread over the Eastern 
States. 

Meantime the Northwest, where all men were working- 
men, was setting up, on paper at least, a complete system of 
free public education, such as the workingmen of Education 
the East were vainly asking for. In the West, ^" *^® ^®^* 
elementary schools drew some help from the national land 
grant in the Survey Ordinance (page '255), and State "uni- 
versities" were founded early to save the national grant 
for "higher institutions of learning" (page '256). a state 
It was natural therefore for the West to try to system 
link primary school and university by public " high-schools," 
so as to form a complete State system. The constitution of 
Indiana in 1816 declared it the duty of the legislature to 
establish "a general system of education, ascending in regular 
graduation from township schools to a State University, — 
wherein tuition shall be gratis and equally open to all.'' 

In practice, however, private academies made the chief 
link between elementary schools and college for two genera- 
tions more. Even the primary schools were often more 
imposing on paper than in fact ; and in many States the 
land grants were wasted or stolen by incompetent or venal 
politicians. Still, by 1840, public schools were frequent 
enough in the Northwest, as in the Northeast, so that a 



444 THE AMERICA OF 1830 

poor boy with ambition and self-denial could usually get 
at least "a common school education." 

'''Higher education"' made even more progress than did 
the common schools. The Western "universities" were 
paper universities for some time more; but the "small 
college" multiplied in numbers and grew toward high 
standards and enlarged usefulness, especially in the North- 
east. Amherst, Bowdoin, Dartmouth, Hobart, Williams, 
in that section, had multitudes of ambitious imitators in the 
Southern and Northwestern States, Every Southern planter 
sent his sons to college, as a matter of course, — very often 
to the larger Northern institutions. In proportion to the 
White population, therefore, the South had more youth in 
college, down to the Civil War, than any other section. In 
1830 Oberlin, in Ohio, opened its doors to women. No other 
institution of equal rank did so for twenty years more ; 
but many "seminaries" for girls soon appeared. 

The first real flowering in American literature came just 
after 1830. America's only earlier distinction in letters had 
American been in political oratory. In this field, from 1812 
letters ^q 1830, Webster, Clay, and Calhoun sustained the 

best traditions of the Revolutionary days ; and those same 
years saw also the early work of Irving, Cooper, Simms, and 
Bryant. All these long continued to grow in fame. And 
now, between 1830 and 1845, began the public career of 
Edward Everett in oratory; of Emerson, Hawthorne, Holmes, 
Longfellow, Lowell, Poe, and Whittier in the literature of 
creative imagination and spiritual power; of Bancroft, 
Prescott, Palfrey, and Sparks in historical composition ; of 
Kent and Story in legal commentary ; of Audubon, Agassiz, 
Dana, Maury, and Asa Gray in science. Noah Webster's 
Dictionary was published in 1828; ten years later, the 
Smithsonian Institution was founded ; and, midway be- 
tween, appeared the first penny daily, the New York Sun. 

New England had the chief glory in this literary out- 
burst ; but all the old sections shared in it, and the 
Northwest gave it as eager appreciation as New England 
itself. The Southern aristocracy had little sympathy with 



THE INTELLECTUAL AWAKENING 



445 



"Yankee" literature, tinged as most of it was with anti- 
slavery sentiment, but clung conservatively to the old 
English classics and to such moderns as Scott, along with 
its own representatives in the lists above. 

The finest part of this literary movement was rooted in 
a New England religious awakening. Between 1815 and 
1830, Unitarianism, organized by William Ellery ^^^^ ^. 
Channing, had deeply modified New England ism and 
thought. Unitarianism was an intellectual re- ^^^'^"^'^y 
volt against the somber and rigid doctrines of the prevalent 
Calvinistic Congrega- 
tionalism. It placed 
hope of salvation not 
in the dogma of the 
atonement, but in con- 
duct ; it asserted, in op- 
position to the doctrine 
of total depravity, that 
there was essential good 
in every man, with pos- 
sibilities of infinite de- 
velopment. It taught, 
not that man's fate was 
predestined, but that he 
was himself master of 
his fate. At first it 
was as sternly logical as 
Calvinism itself ; but 
the Emersonian "Tran- 
scendentalists " of the 
thirties placed emphasis 
upon its cheering affir- 
mations rather than its 
denials, and gave the 
movement a joyous moral enthusiasm. It was both a cause 
and a result of the progress in democracy. The old Congre- 
gationalism had been the fast ally of aristocratic Federalism : 
Unitarianism was an expression of a democratic age. DiflFer 




Ralph Waldo Emerson. The statue by Daniel 
Chester French at the public library of Con- 
cord, Emerson's home. 



446 THE AMERICA OF 1830 

as they might in characteristics, Emerson and Andrew Jack- 
son belonged fundamentally to the same era, — the serene 
prophet of the spiritual worth and dignity of each soul, and 
the passionate apostle of political and social equality. 

Unitarianism never counted large in numbers ; but nearly 
all the famous names catalogued above were connected with 
it, and it early captured Harvard. Gradually, it permeated 
and transformed Calvinistic Congregationalism. A less 
rigidly intellectual revolt against Calvinism, — more emo- 
tional than Unitarianism and equally optimistic and demo- 
cratic, — gave rise to Universalism and to a growth of the 
Methodist churches and of various new sects. Said Emerson 
of this " theological thaw," " 'Tis a whole population of 
ladies and gentlemen out in search of a religion." 

The intellectual and religious ferment of the thirties 
transformed society. Exact and profound scholarship was 
.. pi • still lacking ; but an aspiration for knowledge, 

living a hunger for culture, a splendid idealism, be- 

th-^k^^^" came characteristics of American life, — until 
"fattened out," for a time after 1875, by a 
gross material prosperity. During that long era, to wel- 
come "high thinking" at the price of "plain living" was 
instinctive in an almost unbelievably large portion of the 
people. Ambitious boys, barefoot and in threadworn coats, 
thronged the little colleges, not for four years of a good time, 
but with genuine passion to break into the fairy realm of 
knowledge ;^ and their hard-earned dimes that did not have 

1 In 1846 a boy of eighteen started for Knox College, at Galesburg, Illinois. 
By working as a farm hand (he harvested two weeks for a Virgil and a Latin Dic- 
tionary), and by teaching school for a few months (and "boarding round") at eight 
dollars a month, he had saved up ten dollars. He walked first to Chicago, the 
nearest town, for supplies ; but the unaccustomed temptation of the display in 
a bookstore window lured him within, and most of his capital went for a few books, 
which would seem old-fashioned, indeed, to the boys of to-day. The remaining 
cash bought only a pair of shoes and an Indian-blanket coat (with great stripes 
about the bottom). To save the precious shoes, he then walked the two hundred 
miles from his home to Galesburg barefoot. His first day there, he built a fence 
for the President's cow pasture, to earn money for textbooks, and found a place 
to work for his board through the college year. This man became one of the 
notable builders of a Western commonwealth, and his story is a typical one. 



THE INTELLECTUAL AWAKENING 447 

to go for plain food went for books. English authors of a 
new sort of genius — Carlyle, Browning, William Morris — ■ 
as well as English scientists with new teachings, like Dar- 
win and Huxley, reached appreciative audiences in America 
sooner than at home. It is notorious that Carlyle's long- 
delayed income from his books came first from reprints in 
America, managed by Emerson ; and many another English 
book, afterward recognized as epoch-making, found its way 
into far Western villages, and into the hands of eager young 
men and women there who had never worn evening dress 
or eaten a course dinner, long before it penetrated to even 
the "reading set" at Oxford University. The North Ameri- 
can Review and, a little later, the Atlantic Monthly could be 
seen in isolated farmhouses. Before ISG'^, William Dean 
Howells, then a young newspaper writer in a raw Western 
town, counted Browning and Thackeray among his favorite 
authors ; but Walter Besant mentions in his Autobiography 
that these authors were not then known to his set at 
Cambridge University. 

A caricature picturing a gaunt New England housewife on 
hands and knees to scrub, but pushing before her a stand 
holding an open copy of Emerson to which her eyes were 
glued, might have been applied, with no more exaggeration, 
to the strenuous struggle for culture in many a modest 
home in Kansas or Minnesota. The village sewing society 
eschewed gossip to listen to one of their number reading 
aloud while the others plied the needle. Each village had 
its lyceum, for the winter evenings, with literary programs, — 
readings, declamations, and debates — crude and quaint 
enough, sometimes, but better than "refined vaudeville." 
Such villages, too, aspired to frequent courses of lectures, 
— with such eastern celebrities as Holmes and Everett on 
the program ; and often the proceeds of the lectures were 
used to start a village library.^ Twice, on such lecture 

1 In 1859 Edward Everett lectured at St. Cloud, a new, straggling village of 
a hundred houses, in Minnesota. The one-room schoolhouse in which he spoke 
was promptly named the Everett School; and receipts from the "entertainment 
were appropriated for a library which was kept for years in a private home. After 
the Civil War, a Woman's Aid Society, which had been earning money to send 



448 THE AMERICA OF 1830 

tours, Emerson penetrated beyond the Mississippi, greeted 
in barn-like "halls" by hard-handed men and women, 
seated on wooden benches, with eager faces agleam with 
keen intellectual delight. 

The intellectual and moral ferment of the time overflowed 
in manifold attempts at Utopias set off from ordinary society. 
Attempted Ncw England Transcendentalists tried a coopera- 
utopias iiy^ society at Brook Farm (1841), with which 
Emerson and Hawthorne were connected, and which the 
latter's Blithedale Romance afterward satirized. Robert 
Owen, who had already attempted a model industrial town in 
Scotland, founded New Harmony in Indiana, where labor 
and property were to be in common. Scores of like com- 
munities were soon established in different parts of the 
West; and the old communistic societies of the "Shakers" 
spread rapidly. Said Emerson, with genial recognition of 
the humorous side of the upheaval, "Not a man you meet 
but has a draft of a new community in his pocket." 

Peculiar among these movements was Mormonism, with its 
institution of polygamy. Mormonism was founded at Pal- 
. myra, New York, in 1829, by Joseph Smith, who 
claimed to be a prophet and to have discovered the 
inspired Book of Mormon. Soon the "Latter-Day Saints" 
removed to Ohio ; then to Missouri ; and, driven thence by 
popular hatred, to Illinois, where, in 1841, they established at 
Nauvoo a "Holy City" of ten thousand people, industrious 
and prosperous, ruled by Smith after the fashion of an ancient 
Hebrew "Judge." Three years later, a mob from surrounding 
towns broke up the settlement and murdered Smith. Then, 
under the youthful Brigham Young, the persecuted Mormons 
sought refuge in Utah, vaguely supposed to be a part of 

"luxuries" and medicines to sick soldiers, continued its meetings and used its 
money to enlarge this choice collection of books. There, as a boy, the writer 
made first acquaintance with Carlyle, Marcus Aurelius, standard histories of that 
day, such as Prescott's Philip II and Motley's Rise of the Dutch Republic, and 
the novels of Scott, George Eliot, and Thackeray. This experience was typical. 
The few books, purchased by real book lovers, were not yet buried in a mass of 
commonplace. 



INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL FERMENT 449 

Mexico, but remote from any organized government and 
sheltered from " civilization " by the desert and the Rockies. 
Here their industry made the cactus sands to bloom, and 
they remained in peace until invaded by the rush of gold- 
seekers to California after '49. 

More effective than these attempts at new Utopian socie- 
ties were a multitude of movements for social betterment 
within the existing community. Massachusetts Sodai 
founded the first public hospital for the insane; and betterment 
Dorothy Dix spent a noble life in spreading such institutions 
in other States. Special schools for the deaf and the blind 
were instituted. States began to separate juvenile delin- 
quents from hardened criminals ; and for the criminals 
themselves more rational and wholesome prison life was 
attempted. Temperance societies began in Boston in 
1824 ; and, in 1846, Maine adopted the first State-wide 
prohibition law. The Abolition movement rose and spread, 
and soon the agitation against slavery became the chief 
manifestation of this great wave of moral earnestness. The 
thirties, too, saw the beginning of a long agitation for 
Woman's Rights, including coeducation, equality with men 
in inheriting and owning property, and the franchise. The 
legal position of woman everywhere in America was still 
regulated by the medieval Comrnon law. An unmarried 
woman's earnings and "property" were not hers (any more 
than a slave's were his) , but belonged legally to her father. 
A married woman's property (unless protected by express 
legal settlement) was her husband's, and, in many degrading 
ways, she was herself his chattel. Statute law now began 
faint reform of some of these evils. 

Mechanical invention, too, began to revolutionize in- 
dustry and life. From the inauguration of Washington to 
the War of 1812, patents for new inventions Mechanical 
averaged less than eighty a year. From 1812 to invention 
1820, they rose to nearly two hundred a year, and in 1830 
the number was 544. Twenty years later, the thousand 
mark was passed, and in 1860, the number was nearly 5000. 



450 THE AMERICA OF 1830 

These inventions saved time or tended to make life more 
comfortable or more attractive. A few cases only can be 
mentioned from the bewildering mass. Axes, scythes, and 
other edged tools, formerly imported, were manufactured at 
home. The McCormick reaper appeared in 1831. This 
invention, with its improvements, soon multiplied the 
farmer's efficiency in the harvest field by twenty, and, with 
the general introduction of threshing machines, made it 
possible for our people to use the vast grain lands of the 
Northwest. Planing mills created a new industry in wood. 
Colt's "revolver" (1835) replaced the one-shot "pistol." 
Iron stoves began to rival the ancient fireplace for cooking. 
Friction matches (invented in England in 1827) were the 
first improvement on prehistoric methods of making fire. 
Illuminating gas for city streets improved city morals. In 
1838 the English Great Western, with screw propeller and with 
coal to heat its boilers, established steam navigation across 
the Atlantic, — though the bulk of ocean freight continued 
long to be carried in American sailing ships. The same year 
saw the invention of the steam hammer and the successful 
application of anthracite coal to smelting iron.^ In 1839 a 
Frenchman, Daguerre, began photography with his "da- 
guerreotypes," and still earlier another French chemist had 
found how to can foods. In 1842 the anesthetic value of 
ether, an incomparable boon to suffering humanity, was 
discovered by Dr. Crawford W. Long of Georgia. The 
magnetic telegraph, invented in 1835, was made effective in 
1844. Howe's sewing machine was patented in 1846 ; the 
next year saw the first rotary printing press. 

Except as otherwise indicated, all these inventions were 
by Americans. In 1841 America had its full revenge for 
earlier British disdain, when a member of the English 
cabinet declared in parliament, "I apprehend that a majority 
of the really new inventions [lately introduced into England] 
have originated abroad, especially in America." 

' Pittsburg was already the center of iron manufactures for the West. Now 
its neighborhood to both anthracite and iron made it a center of this great industry 
for the whole country. 



THE COMING OF THE RAILWAY 



451 



The railway 



The Railway deserves a fuller account. Tramways (lines 
of wooden rails for cars drawn by horses, for short distances) 
came into use in some American cities about 1807. 
As early as 1811, John Stevens began twenty years 
of fruitless efforts to interest capital in his dream of a steam 
railway. In 1814, in England, George Stephenson com- 
pleted a locomotive, which found employment in hauling 
coal on short tracks ; but no railway of consequence for 
passenger traffic was opened there until about 1830. After 




The "De Witt Clinton," the first railroad locomotive that ran in New York. It 
made its first trip, August 9, 1831, from Albany to Schenectady. From a photo- 
graph of a "restoration." 

1825, the question was much agitated in America ; and 
July 4, 1828, the aged Charles Carroll, signer of the 
Declaration of Independence, drove the golden spike that 
marked the beginning of the Baltimore and Ohio. The 
same year witnessed a score of charters to projected lines ; 
but construction was slow, from lack of experience and 
materials, and especially from lack of engineers to survey 
and construct roadbeds ; and it was still thought commonly 
that about the only advantage for railroads over canals would 
lie in the freedom from interruption by ice in winter. 
In 1830 less than thirty miles of track were in use, — and 



452 THE AMERICA OF 1830 

this only for "coaches" drawn by horses ; but in 1840 nearly 
three thousand miles were in operation, and, for long there- 
after, the mileage doubled each five years. The early rails 
were of wood, protected from wear by a covering of 
wrought-iron "straps," perhaps half an inch thick, which 
had the awkward habit of curling up at a loosened end. 
The "coaches" imitated the shape of the stagecoach; but 
finally a form more adapted to the new uses was devised. 
The rate of progress on the first roads rose to fifteen miles 
an hour, — something quite beyond previous imagination. 
By 1850, the railroad had begun to outrun settlement, forging 
ahead into the wilderness, "to sow with towns the prairies 
broad," and to create the demand for transportation which 
was to feed it. 

It was natural to treat the railway like any other improved 
road or public highway, so far as conditions would permit. 
Some States, at first, permitted any one to run cars over a line 
by paying proper tolls. But, in the absence of scientific 
system and of telegraphic train-dispatching, so many acci- 
dents occurred, that this plan was given up. Then roadbed 
and train fell to one ownership. It remained to decide 
whether that owner should be the public or a private cor- 
poration. Several States tried State ownership, as with 
canals (Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia) ; 
but lines ran from State to State in such a way as to make 
this practically impossible. No one in that day suggested 
that the nation should own and operate railroads ; and so 
these tremendously powerful forces were abandoned to 
private corporations. 



CHAPTER XXVI 

THE "REVOLUTION OF 1828" 

The victory of Jackson in the Nation was a result of 
democratic victories that unknown men had been winning in 
the States. It was possible only because of a Extension 
recent rapid extension of manhood suffrage. At of manhood 
Washington's election manhood suffrage was found ^" ^^^^ 
in none of the thirteen States. At Jefferson's election it 
was practiced in only Kentucky and Vermont out of the 
sixteen. By 1824 it was established in ten of the twenty- 
four commonwealths, and five others had removed all but 
nominal restrictions upon it.^ 

These reforms had been carried against vehement protest 
by the elder statesmen. The aged John Adams and the stal- 
wart Webster made stubborn resistance in Massa- . . 
chusetts. In New York, Chancellor Kent, a great the win 
lawyer and a noble man, pleaded with the constitu- f* *^® 
tional convention not to "carry desolation through 
all the fabric erected by our fathers," or "put forth to the 
world a constitution such as will merit the scorn of the wise 
and the tears of the patriot." In Virginia (1830), only a 
slight gain was made, and Marshall, Madison, and Ran- 
dolph, ancient foes, joined hands to shut out 80,000 White 
citizens from the vote. 

1 Between 1792 and 1821, eleven new States had been admitted. Tennessee 
had an ineffective restriction on the franchise (removed In a new constitution in 
1833); Ohio at first required payment of taxes as a qualification for voting; and 
Mississippi required either that or service in the militia. The other eight new states 
came in with manhood suffrage. Four of the older States also had followed in the 
footsteps of the progressive West : Maryland adopted manhood suffrage in 1810; 
Connecticut, in 1818; in 1821, Massachusetts and New York reduced their former 
qualifications to tax payment or militia service, and in 1826 New York removed 
1 even this restriction. 

453 



454 



THE AMERICA OF 1830 



Everywhere but in the West leadership in the old party 
of Jefferson had fallen into the hands of aristocrats. With 
striking unanimity, North and South, such leaders now 
publicly denounced the war cry of Jackson — "Let the 
people rule" — as ominous of the "tyranny of mere num- 
bers," or queried in dismay, with that pure and noble 
gentleman, Judge Gaston of South Carolina, "What then is 
to become of our system of checks and balances?" In the 



BmBHe^S «^^^^^^'^ '^^^^^^^H 


^%k!^9^^^^H 






'-:jm 


1 ^P^^^ ^^^ ■: 




t J JBF Jk 



Jefferson's Home, Monticello. 



Federal presidency itself, Monroe and Adams had brought 
back the pomp and ceremonial against which Jefferson 
had contended. 

The election of Jackson then, even more than that of 
Jefferson, marks a true '* revolution'^ in American society, 
" jackso- Again a new feneration had come upon the stage 
nian de- — and indeed upon a new stage. The victory of 
mocracy Jackson was the victory of the new West over the 
old East ; and in the East itself it was the victory 
of the newly awakened labor class. Everywhere it was 



JACKSONIAN DEMOCRACY 



455 



the victory of a new radical democracy, untrained, led by 
"men of the people," over the moderate democracy of 
Jefferson, led by trained, leisured, cultured "gentlemen." 
To compare the exterior of Abraham Lincoln (frontispiece), 
with the portrait of Jefferson on page 408 is to glimpse some 
of the contrast between Jeffersonian and Jacksonian democ- 
racy. Jeffersonian democracy had feared government : 
Jacksonian democracy was eager to use it. The old democ- 
racy had taught that the people should be governed as little 
as possible : the new democracy taught that the people 
might govern as much 
as they liked. More, — 
drunk with its victory, 
democracy began to in- 
sist not merely that 
majorities ought to be 
supreme, as the best 
policy, but even that 
majorities were always 
right: "vox populi, vox 
Deir 

The wider suffrage after 1825 brought other political 
changes. 1. The franchise was used more directly. In an in- 
creasing number of States, the governors and 
judges were chosen by the people instead of by 
the legislatures. So, too, of presidential electors : 
in 1800, ten States of the sixteen chose electors by legislatures ; 
in 1828 only two of the twenty -four did so, and after that 
the only State to continue the practice was South Carolina. 

2. The presidency gained power. It was no longer filled, 
even in theory, by a select coterie. Jackson's friends liked 
to call their leader "the chosen Tribune of the people." 
The Nation found it easier to express its will in choosing 
one man than in choosing a Congress in hundreds of local 
units, often largely upon local issues. 

3. The two matters just mentioned combined to bring 
out a larger vote. The election of 1789 was fiercely contested 




The Birthplace of Abraham Lincoln. 



Results 
of wider 
franchise 



k 



456 JACKSONIAN DEMOCRACY 

in New York, but only one vote was cast for every 27 
inhabitants. In 1828 that State cast a vote for every six 
inhabitants. Pennsylvania cast 47,000 votes in 1824, but 
150,000 in 1828. In Massachusetts only one man in 19 
went to the polls in 1824, but after 1828 the proportion was 
rarely under 1 in 8. 

4. Property qualifications for office disappeared rapidly, 
and test oaths were abolished so that Jews and Catholics 
could hold office. 

5. The union of State and Church in Connecticut and 
Massachusetts was overthrown, and the greater democracy 
in politics in New England brought social changes there. 
After the extension of the suffrage in Connecticut in 1818, 
public officers ceased to wear cockaded hats, powdered 
wigs, or knee-breeches and silk stockings. 

Andrew Jackson dominated America for twelve years 
(1829—1841), for his control reached over into the administra- 
Andrew tion of his succcssor and political heir, Van Buren. 
Jackson jj^ ^^g q^ Scotch-Irish descent, and his boyhood 
had been passed in the backwoods of North Carolina, in bare 
poverty. Picking up some necessary scraps of knowledge, he 
removed to the newer frontier of Tennessee to practice law. 
He was a natural leader ; and his incisiveness and aggressive- 
ness forced him to the front. In 1797 Tennessee sent him 
as her first Representative to Congress, — for which life 
at that time he seems to have been little fitted. Gallatin 
noticed him only for his uncouth dress and manner, — un- 
kempt hair tied in an eel-skin cue, — and Jefferson was dis- 
gusted by the "passion" that "choked his utterance." 

Soon, however, Jackson found his place as military leader 
and Indian fighter ; and he came back to political leadership 
as a more imposing figure, — the natural spokesman of 
Western democracy. "Old Hickory" remained spare in 
person, with the active and abstemious living of the frontier. 
His hair was now a silvered mane. His manner was marked 
by a stately dignity and, toward all women, by true court- 
liness. Beneath this exterior, he remained as pugnacious 



THE SPOILS SYSTEM 457 

and fearless and self-confident as ever, apt to jump to con- 
clusions and stubborn in clinging to them. A choice 
bit of contemporary satire makes him say, "It has always 
bin my way, when I git a notion, to stick to it till it dies a 
natural death ; and the more folks talk agin my notions, 
the more I stick to 'em." He was sure of his own good 
intentions, and, with somewhat less reason, of his good 
judgment. He trusted his friends (not always wisely chosen) 
as himself, and he was moved by an unconscious vanity 




"Clar de Kitchen," a contemporary cartoon, now in the Library of Congress, 
caricaturing Jackson's treatment of his ("kitchen") cabinet when they differed 
from him. The faces are portraits. 

that made it easy for shrewd men to play upon him ; but, 
withal, he had sound democratic instincts, hating monopoly 
and distrusting commercial greed and all appeals from it for 
alliance with the government, and believing devotedly in the 
"sovereignty of the people," a sovereign who "could do no 
wrong." As President he felt himself to be the embodiment 
of the Nation's will ; and he seized a masterful control of 
Congress so successfully and imposingly that all Presidents 
since have felt themselves possessed of rightful power never 
claimed by Washington or Jefferson, One symbol of the 



458 JACKSONIAN DEMOCRACY 

new power of the President was the growth of the veto. 
The preceding six Presidents together had vetoed nine 
bills — all on constitutional grounds ; Jackson hailed twelve 
vetoes on the astounded Congress to control general policy, 
besides using freely the "pocket veto" which was permitted 
by the Constitution but which no former President had used. 

The first and main fault of the new democracy, and of its 
chief, was the degradation of the civil service. Since Jeffer- 
The spoils son's election, there had been no change of party, 
system and, until 1824, no factional contest within the 

dominant party. Accordingly, there had been no occasion 
for sweeping changes among office-holders. In 1820 Senator 
Crawford of Georgia had secured a "four-year tenure-of -office 
bill," providing that a great number of offices should there- 
after always become vacant four years after appointment. 
But Adams, with high-minded dignity, refused to take 
advantage of this legal opportunity to punish adversaries 
and hire supporters. Instead, he reappointed all fit officials, 
and made only twelve removals during his term. The law 
remained, however, a keen weapon for less scrupulous men. 
Jackson, indeed, needed no new weapon : the powers of the 
President under the Constitution were enough. His 
enemies were, to his mind, the Nation's enemies ; and he 
was controlled by friends who brazenly proclaimed the 
doctrine, "To the victors belong the spoils of the enemy." 

Jackson men from distant States hastened to the Capital 
to attend the inauguration and press claims to appoint- 
ments. Never had Washington seen such a horde of hungry 
politicians, and more than one historian has sharpened his 
pen to picture caustically "the scrambling, punch-drinking 
mob which invaded Washington at the inauguration, crowd- 
ing and pushing into the White House, tipping over tubs of 
punch and buckets of ices, standing with muddy, hobnailed 
shoes on the damask furniture." In the preceding forty 
years of the government, there had been less than two 
hundred removals from office for all causes. In his first 
year, Jackson made two thousand. But this was far too 
moderate to content the multitude. The policy of spoils 



NEW POLITICAL MACHINERY 459 

Was the Nation's blunder, not merely the President's ; and 
the Nation was to be shackled by it for more than a gen- 
eration.^ At the moment it resulted in widespread in- 
efficiency and in many scandalous cases of corruption — 
to all of which Jackson held himself stubbornly indifferent. 
His successor reaped the whirlwind. In 1837 (Van Buren's 
first year) the collector of the New York Customs defaulted 
in the sum of a million dollars and, together, 64 of the 67 
land officers stole a million more. 

The enlarged vote called for new 'political machinery. Each 
party created a hierarchy of permanent committees to manage 
its interests. From a National Committee there committee 
radiated downward the many State Committees, and conven- 
From each of these branched the committees for '°° system 
the counties and Congressional districts of the State ; and 
from these, the committees for the precincts in the small- 
est voting units. 

This committee system was soon interwoven with a con- 
vention system. The division into parties had made it 
advisable to agree upon candidates for President in advance 
of the campaign, — something never contemplated, as we 
have seen, by the Constitution. For a while this was 
accomplished by the Congressional caucus (page 319). But 
at such a caucus the members were Congressmen who had 
been chosen two years before, on wholly different issues. 
Men resented it that such uncommissioned "representatives " 
should presume to speak for the party on this vital matter, 
and the repute of "aristocratic King Caucus" had been 
dissipated finally in the campaign of 1824. The same causes 
which discredited the Congressional caucus for the Nation 
had also discredited legislative caucuses for nominating 
State officers ; and New York and Pennsylvania had devised 
State Conventions, chosen in party gatherings in the various 
election districts. This step was extended to the Nation at 
large in the campaign of 1832. 

^ The "spoils system" came into force in some States, notably in New York, 
sooner than in the Nation at large. 



I 



460 JACKSONIAN DEMOCRACY 

This complex machinery called for an immense body of 
workers, — "more people," said a competent authority 
twenty years ago, "than all the other political machinery 
in the world," It was natural, therefore, that its develop- 
ment should have gone along with the appearance of the 
spoils system to pay the necessary recruits. 

Quite as naturally the new machinery created "bosses," to 
direct it. In theory, the political machinery was to represent 
The pouticai the people's will. In practice, among a busy, opti- 
boss mistic people, it was admirably fitted to fall into the 

hands of "professionals." For half a century, while the 
system was at its worst, the average citizen (unless with an 
"ax to grind") largely withdrew from all political duties, 
except that of voting for the names put before him. Office- 
holders of various grades managed the committees of the 
party in power; and expectants for office managed those 
of the other party. Such conditions gave a low tone to 
politics. A campaign, to the most active participants, was 
dangerously like a struggle for mere personal preferment. 
"Ward heelers" and the lowest grade of active workers, 
taking orders from a city boss, managed ward and precinct 
primaries. The professionals were often the only voters to 
appear ; and if other citizens came, they found the chairman, 
judges, and printed tickets all arranged for them by the 
"machine." The managers were usually unscrupulous 
players of the game, and, at a pinch, did not hesitate to 
"pack" a meeting in order to secure the election of their 
delegates. Arrived at State or county convention, such 
delegates, with disciplined obedience, put through the 
"slate" drawn up in advance by the bigger bosses, — who 
commonly had arranged all details with a nicety and pre- 
cision found until recently in few lines of business. 

The big boss was not always an officeholder. His profit 
often came in indirect ways and sometimes in corrupt 
ways. Corporations wishing favors or needing protection 
against unfair treatment were willing to pay liberally the 
man who could secure their will for them. Often the bosses 
of opposing parties in a State have had a perfect under- 



"BOSSES" AND PATRONAGE 461 

standing with each other, working together behind the 
scenes and dividing the pkinder. Corruption and special 
privilege have always been strictly "non-partisan." 

This "boss" system gave new importance to the Presi- 
dent's "patronage." It soon became the rule for him to 
nominate postmasters and other Federal office- j^^^ ^^^ 
holders only on the recommendation of the Presidents 
congressman of the district, if he were of the P**'^°'^^8e 
President's party, or of the "boss" who expected to become 
or to make a congressman. The congressman uses this con- 
trol over Federal patronage to build up a personal machine, 
so as to insure support for his reelection. And the practice 
gives ^ powerful weapon to a strong President, who is often 
able to coerce reluctant congressmen into being "good" by 
hesitating in approving their recommendations for office. 



k 



CHAPTER XXVII 

" THE REIGN " OF ANDREW JACKSON, 1829-1841 

Jackson had two thirds of the electoral votes, — every one 
south of the Potomac and west of the Appalachians, together 
The political with those of Pennsylvania and New York.^ The 
situation question for his opponents was whether the alliance 
of West and South could be broken. Those two sections 
were still united against the capitalistic East by their bitter- 
ness toward the Bank and the Supreme Court ; but neither 
Bank nor Court at this time was in "practical politics." 
The pressing problems concerned protection, nullification, 
and the public lands. 

The North Atlantic section insisted on a continuance of 
high protection, and (under the old apportionment of 1820) 
it still had a powerful vote in Congress. But in the South, 
college boys formed associations to wear homespun, as a 
protest against the Northern manufactures ; and during 
1828-1829 every legislature from Virginia to Mississippi 
had declared for secession or nullification if the tariff policy 
were not radically changed. The West, not very insistent 
either way on the tariff,- was devoted to the Union, which 
the South threatened ; but, in opposition to the East, it 
was even more devoted to securing a freer public land 
policy, to attract new settlers and to protect old settlers 
against tribute to Eastern speculators. This land reform 
was championed in Congress especially by Thomas 
Calhoun, H. BentoYi, Senator from Missouri (page 407), and 
Webster, \}^^ devoted follower of Jackson. 

*^ The other great leaders of the time were the trio 

Calhoun, Webster, and Clay, who had filled the public eye 
since 1816. 

1 These two manufacturing States the labor vote carried for Jackson. 
^ The tariff favored wool and some other raw products of the West. 

462 



POLITICS" AND LEADERS 



463 



Calhoun, of strict Calvinistic training, keen in logic, 
austere in morals, was no longer the ardent young enthusiast 
for nationality that he had been just before and after the 
War of 1812. He had reversed his stand on the tariff, to 
go with his section. He was the chief spokesman of the 
planters, and the most powerful advocate of the right of 




i 



nullification. He still loved the Union, but he believed 
it could be preserved only by making it elastic enough so 
that the States might nullify Federal laws. 

Webster was a majestic intellect and a master in oratory. 
He, too, had reversed his stand both on the tariff and the 
Bank, to go with his section. He was the leading champion 



464 JACKSON'S ADMINISTRATION, 1829-1837 

in Congress of the manufacturing capitalists ; and, from an 
advocate of States Rights in the War of 1812, he had 
become the great defender of the Union. 

Clay, impetuous, versatile, winning, was the only one of 
the three who still held his old positions on leading questions. 
Until 1820 he had been absolutely supreme in the West. 
After that time he had lost influence because of his support 
of the Bank ; and his alliance with Adams in 1824 had 
still further undermined his popularity. However, he re- 
mained the only leader who could at all withstand Jackson 
in his own section ; and not even Jackson won such devoted 
personal enthusiasm. 

The National Bank, like its predecessor of 1791, was a huge 
monopoly — one of the two or three greatest money monopo- 
Tackson ^^^^ ^^ ^^^^ world at that time. It had special privi- 
and the leges not open to other individuals or corporations. 
* It had vast power, too, over State Banks and over 

the business of the country : at a word it could contract the 
currency in circulation by a third. The Bank had used 
its tremendous power for the advantage of the country in 
ways that Jackson could not appreciate ; but at any time 
it might use its power in politics, — and Jackson felt this 
danger vividly. 

The Bank's charter was not to expire until 1836, and 
Jackson's term ended in 1833 ; but in his first message to 
Congress (December, 1829) he called attention to the fact 
that within a few years the Bank must ask for a new charter, 
and asserted that "both the constitutionality and the 
expediency" of the institution were "questioned by a large 
part of our fellow citizens." Clay seized the chance to 
array the Bank against Jackson, and persuaded Biddle (the 
Bank's president) to ask Congress at once for a new charter. 
The bill passed, and Jackson vetoed it (July, 1831), de- 
claring the Bank's control of the country's money a menace 
to business and to democratic government. Again, too, 
despite the decision of the Supreme Court in 1819 (page 
415), he called the Bank charter unconstitutional. 



NULLIFICATION 465 

Jackson's foes were jubilant. Webster and Adams both 
declared that the "old Indian fighter" was in his dotage ; and 
Clay and Biddle printed and circulated 30,000 ^^^ ^j^^ 
copies of the veto as a campaign document to de- campaign 
feat his reelection. It proved an admirable cam- °* ^^^^ 
paign document — for Jackson. In the election of 1832 the 
foremost question was Jackson or the Bank. The President 
was a novice in politics, but he had outplayed the politicians 
and selected the one issue that could keep his old following 
united. The West and Southwest hated the Bank and loved 
Jackson ; the old South at least hated the Bank ; and once 
more the workingmen of the Eastern cities declared vehe- 
mently against all monopolies. The Bank went into politics 
with all its resources, open and secret. In particular it made 
loans on easy terms to fifty members of Congress ; it secured 
the support of the leading papers ; and it paid lavish sums 
to political writers all over the country to attack Jackson, 

Jackson was reelected by 219 electoral votes, to 49 for 
Clay, and he received a larger part of the popular vote than 
any President had had since Washington. For the jacksons 
first time, a President had appealed to the Nation reelection i 
over the head of Congress; and the Nation sustained him. In 
this campaign of 1832 the National Republicans (page 419), 
complaining of Jackson's attempts to dominate Congress, 
took the name Whig — which in England had long indicated 
opposition to royal control over parliament. 

Meantime the question of protection or nullification was 
pressing to the front. In the summer of 1828, while the 
South was seething with talk of secession, Calhoun caihouns 
had brought forward what he thought a milder ' Exposi- 
remedy for the injustice of the tariff. This was *^°° 
his theory of nullification, presented in his famous Expo- 
sition. 

That paper argued (1) that the tariff* was ruinous to the 
South; (2) that "protection" was unconstitutional; (3) 
that, in the case of an Act so injurious and unconstitutional, 
any State had a constitutional right peacefully to nullify the 



466 JACKSONS ADMINISTRATION. 1829-1837 

law within her borders, until Congress should appeal to 
the States and be sustained by three fourths of them — 
the number necessary to amend the Constitution and 
therefore competent to say what was and was not con- 
stitutional. 

Jackson's election in 1829 relieved this tension for a 
time. His first inaugural declared his wish to show "a 
proper respect for the sovereign members of our Union"; 
and he was supposed to dislike the existing tariff. Under 
these conditions, the South hoped that relief might come 
without its taking extreme measures. During 1828-1829, 
Southern leaders pressed upon Jackson unceasingly the 
need of securing new tariff legislation. Then, unexpectedly, 
the question of nullification was argued in "the great debate" 
on the floor of the Senate (January 19-29, 1830). 

Senator Foote of Connecticut voiced the Eastern jealousy 
of Western growth by a resolution to stop the sale of 'public 
The Foote lands. The Westerners resented this attack on 
Resolution their development vigorously. Benton gladly 
seized the chance once more to set forth his plans for preemp- 
tion laws and other schemes to make easier the way for the 
pioneer. But soon the debate ranged far from the original 
matter. Senator Hayne of South Carolina denounced 
. ^ , warmly the East's selfishness, pledged to the West 

And the , '^ . , <• i n. i i ^ 

Hayne- the coutmued support oi the South, and at the 
Webster same time sought to draw the West to the doctrine 
of Calhoun's Exposition. Webster replied to 
Hayne's argument for nullification in two magnificent 
orations, stripping bare the practical absurdity of the 
doctrine, and portrajang in vivid colors the glory of Amer- 
ican nationalism. Webster argued that the Constitution 
made us a Nation. To strengthen this position, he main- 
tained that as one nation "we the people of the United 
States" had made the Constitution. Here facts were against 
him ; but this historical part of his plea was really im- 
material. The vital thing was not the theory of union 
held by a departed generation, but the will and needs of the 
throbbing present. And when he argued that the United 



NULLIFICATION 467 

States was now one Nation, and must so continue, he gave 
deathless form to a truth which, inarticulate before, had 
yet been growing in the consciousness of the progressive 
North and West. Says Professor MacDonald {Jacksonian 
Democracy, 111) : "Hayne argued for a theory, which, 
however once widely held, had been outgrown, and which 
could not under any circumstances be made to work. 
Webster argued for a theory, which, though unhistorical in 
the form in which he presented it, nevertheless gave the 
Federal government ground on which to stand. The one 
. . . looked to the past, the other to the present and 
future. Both were statesmen ; both loved their coun- 
try : but Hayne would call a halt, while Webster would 
march on." 

The Southern leaders now arranged a Jefferson Day 
banquet at Washington (April 13,^1830), at which the toasts 
were saturated with State sovereignty. Jackson, , . 

TftCKson s 

the guest of honor, startled the gathering by pro- toast, " Our 
posing the toast — "Our Federal Union: it must ^^'^^^^}, 
be preserved.'' And soon he took advantage of 
several other opportunities to declare that he would meet 
nullification with force. Jackson, however, did now recom- 
mend revision and reduction of the tariff ; but he failed to 
get what he wanted. Clay thought he could defy both 
Jackson and Calhoun; and the new "tariff of 1832" re- 
moved only the absurd atrocities of 1828, returning to 
about the basis of 1824. This merely strengthened the 
principle of protection, and gave no relief to the South. 

The South Carolina Congressmen now called upon their 
people to decide "whether the rights and liberties which you 
received as a precious inheritance from an illustrious an- 
cestry shall be surrendered tamely ... or transmitted 
undiminished to your posterity." During the National 
campaign for Jackson's reelection, a strenuous State cam- 
paign in South Carolina elected a legislature which by 
large majorities called a State convention. Jackson, mean- 
while, strengthened the Federal garrison at Fort Moultrie 
in Charleston harbor. 



468 JACKSON'S ADMINISTRATION, 1829-1837 

After five days of deliberation, the convention (November 
19), by a vote of 136 to 26, adopted an Ordinance of 
Nullification, declaring the tariff laws void within 
Carolina's Soutli Carolina, and threatening war if the 
Nullification Federal government should attempt to enforce 
them. December 10, 1832, Jackson issued an 
admirable proclamation to the people of South Carolina, 
warning them of the peril into which they were running, 
and aflBrming his determination to enforce the laws — by 
the bayonet if necessary. But to Congress, a few days 
before, he had once more recommended further revision of 
the tariff. The legislature of Virginia, at the suggestion of 
members of the Cabinet, urged compromise. Clay felt the 
The com- wholc protective system endangered, and he joined 
promise on hands with Calhouu to draw a tariff bill acceptable 
® ** to South Carolina, — providing for a reduction 

of the duties in the tariff of 1832, to be made gradually, 
so that by 1842 no rate should exceed 20 per cent. This 
was a return to something lower than the practice in 1816. 
On March 1, 1833, Congress passed both this compromise 
tariff and a Force Bill giving the President forces to bring 
rebellious South Carolina to obedience ; and the President 
took what satisfaction he could get by signing the Force 
South -^^^^ ^ ^^w minutes sooner than the Tariff Bill. 

Carolina March 11, the South Carolina convention reas- 
sembled and rescinded the nullification ordinance. 
Both sides claimed victory. South Carolina certainly had 
not yielded until she got all she had asked. 

Whatever victory the President might possibly have 
boasted in South Carolina he weakened by permitting Georgia 
_ , to nullify a treaty of the United States and a de- 

and nuiiifi- cision of the Supreme Court. Georgia had enacted 
Geor°"'° laws regarding certain lands which United States 
treaties declared to be Indian lands. A missionary 
to the Indians disregarded these pretended laws ; and a 
Georgia court sentenced him to imprisonment for four years 
at hard labor. In March, 1832, the Supreme Court of the 
United States declared the Georgia statute void and ordered 



STRUGGLE WITH THE BANK 469 

the release of the prisoner. "Well," exclahned Jackson, 
"John Marshall has made his decision. Now let him en- 
force it." The missionary remained in prison. 

Jackson's conduct in the two cases is partly explained 
by the fact that in one case he hated Indians, while in the 
other case he hated Calhoun.^ Moreover, Georgia's success 
humiliated only John Marshall, whom Jackson disliked : 
South Carolina would have humiliated the authority of the 
President of the United States, — who happened just then 
to be Andrew Jackson. 

Jackson took his reelection in 1832 as a verdict from the 
people against the Bank. Its charter had three years still 
to run ; but in 1833 the President insisted that The Bank 
the Secretary of the Treasury should thereafter ^eain 
deposit government funds, as they came in, with certain 
"pet" State banks instead of with the National Bank. 
Two secretaries had to be removed before he found one 
willing to take this step ; and the Senate, still controlled 
by the hold-over Whigs, passed a formal censure of the 
President — which his followers some months later managed 
to have expunged. 

The "dying monster," as Jackson men called the Bank, 
fought savagely. Indeed it did not believe it was dying. 
Biddle was confident he could force a new charter ^^^ ^^^ 
through Congress over Jackson's veto. August 1, creates a 
1833, he ordered the twenty-six branch banks to ^^^'^ 
call in loans and reduce their bank-note circulation, so as to 
make "hard times," claiming of course that such contraction 
was necessary because of the loss of the government deposits. 
In the midst of a prosperous year, a short, sharp panic fol- 

' Jackson had discovered that, years before, Calhoun had tried to persuade 
Monroe's Cabinet to have him (Jackson) censured for exceeding his military 
authority. Moreover, a frontiersman like Jackson was certain to sympathize with 
Georgia's attempts to rid her soil of the Indians. Jackson urged Congress re- 
peatedly to remove all Indian tribes to the "Indian Territory" beyond the Missis- 
sippi. This policy was finally adopted in his second administration, giving rise 
to the brief " Black Hawk War" in the Northwest, and to a long-drawn-out Seminole 
War in the Everglades of Florida, No act, however, did more to confirm Jackson's 
popularity in the land-hungry and somewhat ruthless West. 



k 



470 JACKSON'S ADMINISTRATION. 1829-1837 

lowed, manufactured heartlessly by the money power. The 
harvest was abundant ; but the lack of the usual credit was 
felt cruelly in the South and West where large amounts of 
money were always needed at that time of year to "move" 
cotton and grain to Eastern markets. Interest rose from 
six and eight per cent to fifteen and even to twenty -four 
per cent ; and farms and crops went for a song under the 
auctioneer's hammer. Delegations of business men rushed 
to Washington to urge Jackson to surrender. 

Jackson, however, could not be moved to subordinate the 
nation's will to the power of a monied corporation ; and 
soon both Congress and public opinion deserted the Bank. 
In 1834 Biddle gave up the struggle. The Bank applied to 
Pennsylvania for a charter as a State Bank, and meantime 
returned to its old policy in loans and circulation. Business 
became normal at once. 

This grisly matter might at least have warned the nation 
that its credit was overinflated. The warning was ignored ; 

and, three years later, natural causes brought on 
of a real a real financial crisis like that of 1819. 
;■ panic " Since the War of 1812, State banks had doubled 

in numbers and in capital and bulk of loans with- 
out enlarging the total of gold and silver on hand. Many of 
them, especially in the South and West, were "wild-cat" 
banks, weak and recklessly managed. No State had yet 
learned how to guard its citizens against such abuses. Other 
lines of business were equally reckless. The people, especially 
in the South and West, bought their daily supplies "on 
credit" from the store; the storekeepers had bought the 
goods on long time from Eastern wholesalers ; and these in 
turn had bought on credit from the factory or the foreign 
merchant. All this was perhaps necessary ; but it encour- 
aged extravagance. Less excusable was the universal rage 
to invest in land and to speculate in stocks — on credit, 
loaned largely by the unreliable State banks. And after 
1834 the "pet" banks, in which the government deposited 
funds, felt able to loan more freely than ever before. 



THE PANIC OF 1837 471 

The orgy of building roads and canals, too, was in full 
swing. The West had failed to get much in the way of 
internal improvements from the Federal govern- credit and 
ment ; but, confident in its future, it was itself ovennvest- 
pushing canals and railroads into the wilderness. ™®'^* 
Often this was done wastef ully ; and in any case much money 
was "sunk" where it could pay no interest for many years. 
Illinois, with half a million people and a quarter of million 
of dollars for its yearly revenue, bonded itself for roads 
and canals to the amount of $14,000,000. In 1820 State 
debts all together were under $13,000,000: in 1840 they 
were $200,000,000, mainly owed to European capitalists, who 
drew $12,000,000 interest yearly from America. 

Another government measure scattered more widely the 
infection of overinvestment. In 1835 the national debt 
was paid, and a surplus was piling up in the Treasury at the 
rate of $35,000,000 a year. Taxes could not be reduced con- 
veniently : half this income came from the tariff, and the 
government was pledged not to disturb that until 1842 at 
least ; the other half came from the public lands, and the 
West would not listen to any suggestion for shutting down on 
those sales. Accordingly, the government decided to divide 
this surplus among the States. The money then found its way, 
as State deposits, into State banks and into the same round 
of speculation. To avoid constitutional scruples, this gift to 
the States was called a "loan without interest." Twenty- 
eight million dollars were distributed. Then the "panic" 
seized the country, and before the end of 1837 the Treasury 
was trying to borrow money for necessary expenses. No call 
was ever made upon the States for a return of the "loan." 

In the final year of his administration, Jackson became 
alarmed at the rapid sale of public lands, paid for in paper 
only; and his famous "Specie Circular" ordered The Specie 
United States land offices thereafter to accept Circular and 
only gold and silver in payment for public lands * ® "^^ 
(July, 1836). This was unmistakable notice to the country 
that the vast bulk of its currency was dubious in value, 
— and the crash came. 



472 VAN BUREN 

Martin Van Buren, of New York, Jackson's faithful 
counselor, was elected to the presidency that fall, in time to 
reap the whirlwind. In May, 1837, every bank in the 
country suspended specie payment, and great numbers 
closed their doors. Gold and silver went into hiding, and 
bank paper depreciated in fantastic and varying degrees 
in different parts of the country, but everywhere ruinously. 
Merchants failed ; factories closed down ; unemployed thou- 
sands faced starvation. The Labor movement was crushed 
out. Normal conditions were not restored for five years. 

Van Buren saw his chance for a successful administra- 
tion ruined by the disaster, but he met the situation with 
Van Buren's calm good scusc. His mcssagc to Congress pointed 
administra- out the real causcs of the panic and the slow road 
^^°^ back to prosperity. Meantime, for the govern- 

ment funds, he recommended an Inde'pendent Treasury (in- 
dependent of all banks). In 1840 this plan was adopted, 
though for some years the Whigs fought desperately to 
revive their pet scheme of a National Bank. The govern- 
ment built itself great vaults at Washington and other 
leading cities ; and until recently the National funds were 
handled solely in these, under the direction of the Treasury 
Department. 

The two other great measures of Van Buren's four years 
The Pre- Were the ten-hour order (page 440) and a pre- 
emption Act emption law. 

° By 1830, the sale of public lands was bringing 

in as much money as the tariff. The revenue was not then 
needed ; and the well-to-do classes in the Eastern States felt 
that the lands ought to be sold more slowly, so as, eventually, 
to- produce more revenue when it should be more needed 
(page 466). The new States stood for a different policy. 
They looked upon the public lands not as a source of reve- 
nue, but as a source of homes and as a means of develop- 
ing the country, and were ready even to give them away, in 
order to encourage rapid settlement. The workingmen 
of the North Atlantic section threw their weight over- 
whelmingly into the same scale. As early as 1828, before 



THE PUBLIC DOMAIN 473 

« 

the West itself was fully aroused, the Mechanics' Free 
Press circulated a memorial for signature among its con- 
stituency, urging Congress to place "all the Public Lands, 
without the delay of sales, within reach of the people at large, 
by right of a title by occupancy only," since "the present 
state of affairs must lead to the wealth of a few," and since 
"all men . . . have naturally a birthright in the soil." 
And says Dr. Commons : — 

"The organized workingmen . . . discovered that the reason 
why their wages did not rise and why their strikes were ineffective 
was because escape from the crowded cities of the East was shut 
off by land speculation. In their conventions and papers, there- 
fore, they demanded that the public lands should no more be 
treated as a source of revenue to relieve taxpayers, but as an 
instrument of social reform to raise the wages of labor. And when 
we, in later years, refer to our wide domain and our great natural 
resources as reasons for high wages in this country, it is well to 
remember that access to these resources loas secured only by agitation 
and by act of legislation. Not merely as a gift of nature, but 
mainly as a demand of democracy, have the nation's resources con- 
tributed to the elevation of labor." 

For a while in the thirties, the West urged that each State 
should be given all the public domain within its borders. To 
steal the Democratic thunder, and to head off this plan, 
which would have destroyed all uniformity in dealing with 
public lands and wiped out a powerful bond of National 
union. Clay advocated that all proceeds of public-land sales 
should be distributed among the States in proportion to their 
Congressional representation. His first bills failed, but, with 
the return of prosperity in 1841, he carried a law with three 
features : (1) it divided among the States (for a limited 
time) 90 per cent of the proceeds of the land sales ; (2) it 
inaugurated the policy, since maintained, of giving to each 
new State ^ a liberal amount of lands to form a State fund 

1 Similar grants were provided also for those of the older States which had 
not already had a liberal control over the lands within their borders. This grant 
was in addition to the customary grant of school lands, and followed out the principle 
of the original grant to Ohio for internal improvements. 



474 VAN BUREN 

for internal improvements ; (3) it contained the famous 
provision (championed by Benton for twenty years) which 
gave to the whole law its name The Preemption Act. 

Until this time, settlers had pushed on ahead of land- 
office sales, as squatters. Later would come a public sale, 
wherein the land office put up each "forty" at auction. 
Speculators with Eastern money attended, eager to get 
choice pieces. A settler was sometimes outbid (losing the 
results of his labor upon the land and of his foresight in 
selecting it) or was compelled to pay much more than the 
minimum price of $1.25 an acre — at which the frontier 
community felt he was entitled to get his land. The preemp- 
tion law provided simple means by which the settler might 
"file upon" a piece of land in advance of the regular sale, 
and so "pre-empt" the privilege of retaining it by paying 
the minimum price when the sale came on. 

Even before this law, its purpose had been commonly se- 
cured by "'Settlers'' Associations." With the frontier instinct 
" Settlers' ^^^ rougli justicc cvcn at the expense of legal 
Associa- forms, the settlers had learned to band themselves 
^^°^^ together to maintain "squatters' rights" at these 

government sales. The procedure was sometimes dramatic. 
The Association "Captain" sat on the rude platform beside 
the auctioneer, — a list of settlers' claims in hand and re- 
volver in belt, with his stalwart associates, armed, in the 
company about. When a piece was put up on which a 
squatter had made improvements, the "Captain" spoke the 
word "Settled," — which was notice to outsiders that the 
settler must be permitted to bid it in at the minimum 
price without competition. 

An incident of such a sale in Illinois in the thirties has been 
described to the writer by an eye-witness who stood, a boy, 
on the outskirts of the little crowd. The "Captain" was 
John Campbell, a black-browed Presbyterian Scot, standing 
six feet four. In one case an Eastern bidder failed to h«ar, or 
to respect, the gruff "Settled," and made a higher bid. 
With a bound from the platform, Campbell seized the 



\ 



"TIPPECANOE AND TYLER TOO" 475 

offender by the waist, lifted him into the air, hurled him to 
the ground, and, foot on the prostrate form and cocked 
revolver in hand, asked significantly, — "Did we hear you 
speak?" Protestations of misunderstanding and earnest 
disclaimers followed from the frightened man. Bending 
forward, Campbell set him, none too gently, on his feet, 
admonished him solemnly, "See that it doesn't happen 
again" ; and returned, in unruffled dignity, to the platform, 
where the government official had been quietly waiting. 
The land was then knocked down to the squatter at the 
minimum price, and the sale proceeded decorously, to general 
satisfaction. 

The campaign of 1840 marks the final disappearance from 
American politics of all avowed belief in aristocracy. The 
two parties rivaled each other in proclaiming devo- Election 
tion to the will of the people ; and the Whigs won °^ ^^*° 
because their clamor was the loudest and because the 
Democrats were discredited by the panic of '37. 

The Whig candidate was William Henry Harrison, the 
victor of Tippecanoe. An opponent referred to him con- 
temptuously as a rude frontiersman fit only to live .. xippe- 
in a log cabin and drink hard cider. The Whigs canoe and 
turned this slur into effective ammunition. They ^ ^^' 
had no official platform, and their candidate for Vice 
President, Tyler, was a Statesrights Democrat who happened 
to be hostile to Van Buren. But they swept the country 
in a "Hurrah Boys" campaign for "Tippecanoe and Tyler, 
too," — the chief features being immense mass meetings in 
the country and torchlight processions in the cities, with 
both sorts of entertainment centering round log cabins 
and barrels of cider. 

Harrison carried twenty States, to six for the Democrats, 
and his party secured a working majority in both Houses of 
Congress ; but the new President died within a Tyler's 
month of the inauguration, and Tyler opposed his vetoes 
veto to the Whig measures. Two bills to restore a ITnited 
States Bank (in place of the Independent Treasury) fell in 



476 TYLERS ADMINISTRATION 

this way in August and September of 1841. Whig papers 
raised a bitter cry of "Judas Iscariot" ; and every member of 
the Cabinet resigned except Daniel Webster. In like manner 
the veto killed two bills for an extreme protective tariff, 
but a third and more moderate measure received the Presi- 
dent's approval. The compromise of 1832, which had just 
Tarifif of taken full effect, was at once undone. The panic 
1842 Qf 1837 had depleted the treasury ; and, aided by 

the cry for revenue, the protective "Tariff of 1842" was 
enacted, raising the rates to about the level of 1832. 

The Whigs certainly had a "mandate" from the country 
for the change. "Protection" was the one principle that 
" Protec- they had stood for in the campaign. Curiously 
tion " for euough, the ground on which they had de- 
g wages j^^jjuded "protection" was altogether new. The 
old demand (1816-1832) had been aristocratic — in the 
interest of wealth. "Protect the manufacturers," it said, 
^'because they have to pay such high wages." The new 
demand, formulated by Horace Greelej^ and advocated 
by him with religious fervor in his New York Tribune, 
stood for social and democratic reform — in the interest 
of the workers. "Protect manufactures," it said, ^^ in order 
that the workmen may continue to get high wages." 
Greeley continued to preach this doctrine for more than 
thirty years ; and during all that time his paper was the 
most influential publication in America. Almost at once, 
however, the contest over slavery drew public attention 
away from other problems ; and this new argument for 
protective tariffs was not duly sifted until a much later 
time. 

Tariff history, down to the Civil War, is conveniently 
disposed of here in a few words. The Democrats came 
other back to power at the next election, and enacted the 

tariffs ''Walker revenue tariff^' of 184^6. Imports such 

as coffees and teas and other articles of common 
use, not produced in the United States, were taxed very high, 
while manufactures previously protected (iron, wool, etc.) 



DORRS REBELLION 477 

were taxed only thirty per cent. The measure was called 
a free-trade tariff, but it afforded a moderate degree of 
protection, besides nearly doubling the revenue. In 1857 
rates were reduced materially for a time, to a real "tariff 
for revenue" basis. 

Webster kept his unpleasant position as Secretary of State 
under Tyler in order to complete an important negotiation 
with England. Soon after the settlement of the Webster- 
dispute regarding the St. Croix River (page 325), Ashburton 
another difference of opinion had arisen regarding ^^^^^ 
the northern boundary of Maine farther to the west. 
England claimed one line, and the United States another, 
from different interpretations of the words of the Treaty of 
1783. The King of the Netherlands, to whom as arbitrator 
the contention was submitted, exceeded his province by 
drawing a compromise line without reference to the merits of 
the question ; and the United States refused to accept the 
award. In 1842 the question was settled by the Webster- 
Ashburton Treaty, which gave each country about half the 
disputed territory. 

No story of this period can afford to ignore a striking 
episode in the struggle for democracy within Rhode Island. 
In that state in the latter part of the colonial Dorrs 
period, the franchise had become the narrowest Rebellion 
perhaps, in any colony. No man could vote unless he owned 
real estate worth $131^, or unless he were the oldest son of such 
a man. Moreover, the smallest town had as much weight in 
the legislature as the capital city — which contained about a 
third of the whole population. For sixty years after the 
Revolution, these abuses continued. The people had long 
clamored for reform, but the close oligarchy paid no attention 
to the cry. In 1841, unable to get action through the oli- 
garchic legislature, a People's party arranged, without legisla- 
tive approval, for the election of a constitutional convention by 
manhood suffrage. The great mass of the citizens took part 
in choosing the convention ; and its new constitution was 
duly ratified by a popular vote. Then the people chose 



478 TYLER'S ADMINISTRATION 

their leader in this revolution, Thomas Wilson Dorr, for 
governor under the new constitution. The old " charter gov- 
ernment" refused to surrender possession of the government, 
and was supported by President Tyler, with the promise of 
Federal troops. The revolutionary government then van- 
ished, and Dorr was tried for treason, and condemned to 
imprisonment for life at hard labor. The democratic up- 
rising is known as Dorr's Rebellion. 

The oligarchic "charter government" saw, however, that 
it must give way, but it sought, successfully, to save some- 
thing from the wreck. It called a constitutional convention, 
while hundreds of democratic leaders were in jail under 
martial law sentences ; and though its new constitution 
(1842) provided for manhood suffrage for native Americans, 
the landed qualification for naturalized citizens was main- 
tained (until 1882), along with the "rotten borough" basis 
for the upper House of the legislature, and with the appoint- 
ment of local officers by that House. The first legislature 
of the new government set Dorr free by special act, — not 
by the usual form of pardon ; but this martyr to the cause 
of constitutional freedom died some years later from disease 
contracted in his unwholesome prison life. 



PART IX — SLAVERY 
CHAPTER XXVIII 

SLAVERY TO 1844 

In 1844 the Slave Power began to demand more territory ; 
and, for the next twenty years, slavery was the dominant 
question in American politics. This chapter is an intro- 
duction to that story. 

The Revolution, with its emphasis upon human rights, 
created the first antislavery movement.^ This movement 
lasted until about 1820, though it spent its 
greatest force before 1800. It was moral ajid before 1820 
religious, rather than political, belonging to the on the 
South quite as much as to the North ; and 
it was considerate of the slaveholder's difficulties. On 
their part, the slaveholders during this period (outside 
Georgia and South Carolina) apologized for slavery as an 
evil they would be glad to get rid of safely. 

Slavery seemed dying. Vermont's constitution of 1777 
abolished slavery, as did that of Massachusetts, indirectly, 
in 1780 (page 215) and that of New Hampshire in Gradual 
1783. By law, Pennsylvania decreed freedom for emanci- 
all children born to slave parents in her territory p***°° 
after 1780 ; and this sort of gradual emancipation was 
adopted in Connecticut and Rhode Island in 1784, in New 
York in 1799, and in New Jersey in 1804. 

After 1804, no slave could be born north of Mason and 
Dixon's line; but nearly all the "free States" continued to 
contain slaves born before "gradual emancipation" began. 

^ So, too, Revolutionary France abolished slavery in her West Indies in 1794, 
as did the Spanish-American States, without exception, as they won their in- 
dependence after 1815. 

479 



480 SLAVERY BEFORE 1844 

The census of 1830 showed some 2700 in the North ; and as 
late as 1850 New Jersey counted 236. So, too, all the States 
of the Old Northwest, except Michigan, contained some 
slaves in 1840, — survivors of those owned by the original 
French settlers. The antislavery provision in the North- 
west Ordinance was interpreted, in practice, not to free 
existing slaves, but merely to forbid the introduction of 
new ones. 

In the Southern States, too, many leaders urged gradual 
emancipation with provision for removing the Negroes. This 
,., . sentiment created the American Colonization So- 

ciety, which established the Negro Republic of 
Liberia on the African coast as a home for ex-slaves. The 
Society proved unable, however, to send Negroes to Africa 
as rapidly as they were born in America. 

If slavery was to die, two things were essential : new 
slaves must not be imported from abroad, and slavery 
must not spread into new territory. 

Between 1776 and 1781, the foreign slave trade was pro- 
hibited by every State except South Carolina and Georgia. 
Foreign In deference to the demand of these two States, 
slave trade i\^^ Constitution permitted the importation of 
slaves for a limited time (page 287) ; but as soon as the 
twenty -year period had expired, the trade was prohibited 
by Congress. Still the trade lived and grew. 

From 1807, England had kept a naval patrol on the 
African coast to intercept "slavers," who were regarded as 
pirates by most European nations. Unhappily, England's 
invitations to the United States to join in this good work, in 
1817 and 1824, were rejected by our Government. The 
War of 1812 had made Americans exceedingly sensitive 
regarding the "right of search," and we now refused to per- 
mit an English ship to search a vessel flying the American 
flag, even to ascertain whether that flag covered an Amer- 
ican ship. Consequently oiu' flag was used by slavers of all 
nations (especially, it must be confessed, of our own), 
engaged in the horrible and lucrative business of stealing 
Negroes in Africa to sell in Brazil or Cuba, or, after running 



THE SLAVE TRADE 481 

our ineffective patrol, in the cities of South Carolina, where 
little disguise was made of the defiance of the Federal law. 
In 1842, in the Ashburton Treaty, the United States joined 
England in an agreement to keep a joint squadron off the 
coast of Africa to suppress the trade ; but we did not take 
our proper share in this work until after the opening of the 
Civil War. Between 1850 and 1860, the trade grew rapidly, 
and hundreds of thousands of Negroes fresh from the African 
jungle were auctioned off in Southern markets. 

Slavery had " followed the flag " as settlement expanded, 
except for the region protected, none too perfectly, by the 
Northwest Ordinance. Congress vacillated. It 
established slavery in the District of Columbia, and in the 
reenacted the slave code of Virginia and Maryland District of 
for that District. Accordingly, under the shadow 
of the Capitol, a strange Negro might be arrested and 
advertised on the suspicion of being an escaped slave ; 
and if no owner appeared to prove that suspicion, he might 
still be sold into slavery to satisfy the jailer's fees. And 
for the Nation at large Congress passed the infamous 
Fugitive Slave Act of 1793; but it resisted many attempts 
by the people of Indiana and Illinois to secure the repeal 
of the antislavery provision of the Northwest And in the 
Ordinance. None the less the government winked Northwest 
at evasion of that provision. Thousands of slaves were 
brought into the two Territories under forms of indenture or 
of ''labor contracts''' ; and Territorial "Black laws" were 
enacted to sanction this disguised slavery. "To all intents 
and purposes," says Professor McMaster, "slavery was 
as much a domestic institution of Illinois in 1820 as of 
Kentucky." 

The ten years from the Missouri Compromise to the election 
of Jackson (1820-1829) form a transition period. Slavery 
was still defended as an evil, but as an evil inevi- The second 
table and permanent. Its defenders still stood on period, 
the defensive, but they were less apologetic in tone. ^^^^"^^^^ 

This new attitude was due to a moneyed interest. Slavery 



482 SLAVERY BEFORE 1844 

was growing more profitable. The increased efficiency of 
slave labor because of the cotton gin raised the value of a 
field hand from $200 in 1790 to $1000 in 1840. The Border 
States, where slavery had never been particularly profitable, 
found that they could raise and sell slaves at high prices 
to more Southern communities. Moreover, the admission of 
Louisiana as a slave State, together with the extension of 
slavery into the rest of the Southwest, made its overthrow 
seem less possible. 

The struggle over the Missouri Compromise was the first 
great indication of this changing attitude. The measure 
And the ^^^ distinctly Southern. It won Missouri and 
Missouri Arkansas to slavery ; and this extension was favored 
ompromise ^^ Clay, Madison, and the aged Jefferson! Not a 
Southern congressman voted for a " free Missouri " ; while 
only fifteen Northerners voted against the restriction on 
slavery — and only three of these secured reelection. 

These ten years of transition bring us to the third and final 

period. By 1830 the Slave Power had become aggressive. It 

advocated slavery thereafter as a good, economic 

aggressive and moral, for both slave and master, and as 

in the third ^j^^ only comcr stone for the highest type of 

period , .,. \ , i tvt 

Civilization. In consequence, the Negro was 
represented as animal rather than human, and wholly 
unfit for freedom. Calhoun devoted the remaining years 
of his life to advocating these views. 

By 1830, too, slavery had taken on somewhat darker 
phases than were common in the earlier period. In Virginia 
Darker and the Border States it continued, on the whole, 

phases humane and semi-patriarchal, except for the dis- 

tressing sale of parts of a slave family. But the plantation 
type of slavery, formerly characteristic mainly of Carolina 
or Georgia rice swamps, had now been extended over 
vast cotton areas in all the "Lower South." Even in that 
district, of course, the house servants were petted and gently 
cared for, as a rule ; and often between masters and slaves 
there was warm affection. On most plantations, too, where 



SLAVERY BECOMES AGRESSIVE AFTER 1829 483 

the owner's family resided, master and mistress felt a high 
sense of duty to their helpless "charges," even of the field- 
hand class. But the majority of plantations were managed 
by overseers, drawn from the lower strata of the Whites, 
brutalized by irresponsible and despotic power, and forced 
to be hard taskmasters by the system under which they 
lived. The overseer's reputation as a valuable man de- 
pended solely upon the number of bales of cotton he could 
turn out ; and he was tempted increasingly to drive harder 
and more mercilessly. State laws forbade murdering a 
slave at the whipping-post ; but a loop-hole was usuall}^ 
provided by some clause pronouncing the owner or overseer 
guiltless if a slave "died" as the result of only "moderate 
correction." In any case, a Negro's testimony could not 
be taken against a White man, and often the merciless 
overseer was the only White present at his crimes. 

It was the general belief, too, that the Negro would work 
only under the lash or the fear of it ; and it was a common 
thing for the overseer to furnish long whips to the "drivers" 
(chosen usually from the more brutal slaves), who stalked 
up and down between the rows of workers. In the extreme 
South, it was not unheard of for a master himself to avow 
the economic policy of working to death his gang of slaves 
every seven years or so, in favor of a new supply. In general, 
however, critical observers had to confess that the same 
motives which secure reasonable treatment for a teamster's 
horses kept the slave in good condition. 

Among the worst direct evils of the system was the ruin 
to family life. The better sort of Whites tried to keep slave 
families together ; but legislation did not compel this 
decency, and, in practice, the division of families was 
exceedingly common. Indeed, the southern branches of the 
Protestant churches, by formal resolution, recognized the 
separate sale of a husband or wife as a true "divorce," and 
permitted "remarriage" on such ground. In consequence of 
this condition, sex relations remained horribly degraded 
and confused. 

On the other hand, the South pointed to the pitiful con- 



484 SLAVERY BEFORE 1844 

dition of the mass of White labor in Northern factories, and 
argued eagerly that the slave was no worse off. Said 
DeBow's Review, the leading Southern periodical, — "Where 
a man is compelled to labor at the will of another, and to give 
him much the greater portion of the product of his labor, 
there Slavery exists ; and it is immaterial by what sort of 
compulsion the will of the laborer be subdued. It is what 
no human being would do without some sort of compulsion 
— if not blows, then torture to his will by fear of starvation 
for himself or his family." 

The new aggressive attitude of the Slave Power was 
caused in some degree by the appearance of new aggressive 
The Aboii- autislavery workers, known as Abolitionists, who 
tionists cried out for immediate and complete destruction of 

slavery. For some years before 1830, Benjamin Lundy had 
published at Baltimore The Genius of Universal Emancipa- 
tion, devoted to this teaching. In 1828 Lundy found a greater 
disciple in one of his assistant printers, William Lloyd 
Garrison. Young, poor, friendless, in 1831 Garrison began 
in Boston the publication of the Liberator; and the first 
number (printed on paper secured with difficulty on credit, 
and set up wholly by Garrison's own hand) carried at its 
head a declaration of war : — 

"Let Southern oppressors tremble ... I shall strenuously 
contend for immediate enfranchisement ... I will be as harsh as 
truth and as uncompromising as justice ... I do not wish to 
think, or speak, or write, with moderation ... I am in earnest — 
I will not equivocate — I will not retreat a single inch — anu i 

WILL BE HEARD." 

To the end, this remained the keynote of the Garrisonian 
Abolitionists. They sought to arouse the moral sense of the 
North against slavery as a wrong to human nature. For 
long years their vehemence made them social outcasts, even 
when they were not in danger of physical violence. Among 
the group were Wendell Phillips, a youth of high social 
position and opportunity, who forsook his career to become 
the hated and despised orator of the Abolition cause ; 



AND THE ABOLITIONISTS 485 

Whittier, the gentle Quaker poet, whose verse rang like a 
bugle call ; Theodore Parker, a Unitarian minister of Boston, 
"the terrible pastor of Abolition"; and, at a later time, 
James Russell Lowell, whose scathing satire in the Biglow 
Papers struck most effective blows for freedom, and whose 
established position helped to make Abolitionism "respect- 
able." 

Of this body of agitators. Garrison remained the most 
extreme. He could see no part of the slaveholder's side, 
and he dealt only in stern denunciation of all winiam 
opponents — and even of moderate supporters. He Lloyd 
and his group had no direct influence upon political ^'^"^°° 
action against slavery. Many of them disclaimed desire for 
any such influence. Garrison bnce burned in public a copy 
of the Constitution, defaming it as "a Covenant with Death 
and an agreement with Hell" ; and the only political action 
advocated by him for Northern men was secession by the 
free States. So, too, Lowell's " Hosea Biglow " exclaims : — 

" Ef I'd my way, I hed ruther 
We should go to work an' part, — 
They take one way, we take t'other, — 
Guess it wouldn't break my heart. 
Men hed ought to put asunder 
Them that God has noways jined ; 
An' I shouldn't gretly wonder 
Ef there's thousands of my mind." 

A more moderate group of Abolitionists contained such 
men as William Ellery Channing, James Freeman Clarke, 
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and Samuel J. May ^jjg .. ^lod- 
(Unitarian ministers) , Emerson, Longfellow, Gerrit erate " Abo- 
Smith, William Jay, and the aged Gallatin. For "*'°'^'*' 
Channing's logical but temperate indictment of slavery. Gar- 
rison, however, had only abuse. In return, Emerson at first 
condemned the Garrisonian extremists with unaccustomed 
harshness; but later he said that "they might be wrong- 
headed, but they were wrong-headed in the right direction.'^ 

Other foes of slavery, like Lincoln, rejected the name 
Abolitionist, altogether, and declared that the Garrisonian 



486 SLAVERY FROM 1829 TO 1844 

group harmed more than they helped. Garrison and his 
friends did rouse bitter antagonism and make their oppo- 
nents more aggressive : but they achieved their purpose by 
being ""heard." The nation would have been glad to forget 
the wrongs of slavery : these men made that impossible — 
sometimes by exaggerating and misrepresenting those wrongs 
— and they trusted to the moral sense of the people to do the 
rest. They made slavery a topic of discussion at every 
Northern fireside, — and slavery could not stand discussion. 

A slaveholding community lives always over a sleeping 
volcano. The unspoken dread of all southern Whites was a 
Nat possible slave insurrection, with its unimaginable 

Turners horrors. Earlier in the century, two plots had 
insurrection j^^^j^ discovered, by fortunate accidents, just 
in time to avert terrible disaster. Then, in 1831, came 
Nat Turner's rising. Turner was a Negro preacher and 
slave in Virginia. The plot so far miscarried that only 
a handful of slaves took part ; but sixty Whites, includ- 
ing several children, were ferociously massacred, and, 
before order was restored, a hundred Negroes (five times 
the number in the rising) were shot, hanged, tortured, 
or burned. The South was thrown into a frenzy of 
terror and rage. Excited opinion charged that the rising 
was due directly to inflammatory articles in Garrison's 
Liberator. Southern States enacted stricter laws against 
the education and freedom of movement of slaves, and even 
of free Negroes, and the legislature of Georgia offered a 
reward of $5000 to any kidnaper who should bring Garrison 
to that State for trial under her laws against inciting servile 
insurrection. 

The Slave Power now attacked the rights of White men. 
After 1831 the former freedom of discussion about slavery 
The Slave Vanished south of Mason and Dixon's line. Anti- 
^°Z^^ h* slavery societies dissolved ; antislavery meetings 
rights of could no longer find halls or audiences ; anti- 
White men gJavcry publications were forced out. In many 
cases these ends were secured by mob violence. In 1835 



THE ATTACK ON FREE SPEECH 487 

James G. Birney, a Kentuckian who had long worked 
valiantly against slavery in Alabama and in his native 
State, was driven to move his antislavery paper across 
the Ohio to Cincinnati. Even there, his office was sacked, 
and his life sought, by a bloodthirsty proslavery mob, 
largely from Kentucky, while respectable Cincinnati citi- 
zens merely advised him to seek safety in silence. 

This was in 1836. The year before, a Boston mob, "in 
broadcloth and silk hats," had broken up one of Garrison's 
meetings, gutted his printing office, and dragged Garrison 
himself through the streets by a rope around his body — 
until he was rescued and protected by the mayor hy being 
jailed! And in Alton, Illinois, the year after (1837), mobs 
twice sacked the office of Elijah Lovejoy, an Abolitionist 
editor, and finally murdered Lovejoy when he tried to 
defend his property from a third assault. 

A free press was the particular object of attack ; and for 
many years practically every Abolitionist paper in cities 
large or small ran danger of such destruction, attacks 
Scores of cases might be given. In the little upon a 
frontier village of St. Cloud, Minnesota, a pro- ^^^ ^^^^^ 
slavery mob sacked the printing office of Mrs. Jane G. 
Swisshelm, and threw her press into the Mississippi. 
There was this difference in the matter, however, between 
North and South. In the South, discussion was abso- 
lutely strangled. In the North, Lovejoy was the only 
martyr to suffer death ; and resolute men and women 
found it possible to continue the discussion, and eventu- 
ally to win a hearing. • At St. Cloud, a mass meeting, 
excited not in behalf of Abolitionism, but by the attack upon 
free speech, promptly subscribed money to replace the 
press, — no small thing in a petty frontier village of working- 
men. By contrast, respectable people and large property 
interests showed a curious cowardice in these conflicts. 
Alton, in a measure, was dependent upon trade from the 
Missouri side of the Mississippi. Cincinnati's prosperity, 
in like fashion, was supposed to depend upon Kentucky 
trade. In both towns the cry arose that antislavery publi- 



488 SLAVERY FROM 1829 TO 1844 

cations alienated the Slave State visitors and customers, 
and "hurt business " ; and, before this direful threat, mayors, 
ministers, bankers, and every newspaper in both cities were 
whipped into submission, quite in the fashion of later times. 

Mob attacks upon free speech were ominous to all men 
who really cared for their own rights, and they summoned 
to the antislavery cause many who had never been moved by 
wrong to the Negro ; but still more significant were demands 
by the South that the National government and the North- 
ern States should by law stifle discussion. 

In 1835, in response to vehement appeals from Southern 
legislatures, President Jackson recommended Congress to 
And the pass laws that would exclude "incendiary publica- 
maiis tions" from the mails. "But," cried antislavery 

men — and many others never before so counted — - " Who is 
to judge what is incendiary ? On such a charge, the Bible or 
the Constitution might be excluded." After a sharp struggle, 
the bill failed to pass, but there followed an even more ar- 
rogant attempt to destroy the ancient right of petition. 
Since 1820, petitions had poured upon Congress in ever in- 
creasing bulk for the abolition of slaverj^ in the District of 
Columbia. In the ordinary course, such a petition was 
referred to an appropriate committee, and if ever reported 
upon, it was rejected. But in 1836, the sensitive Southern 
And the members secured a "gag resolution" which each 
right of new Congress for eight years incorporated in its 
pe 1 ion standing rules, — so that all petitions concerning 
slavery should be "laid on the table" without being discussed 
or printed or read. 

The Slave Power thought exultantly that it had choked 
off discussion. Instead, it had merely identified the anti- 
The " Old slavery movement with a traditional right of 
Man the English-speaking people. The "Old Man 

oquen Eloqucut," John Quincy Adams, now Representa- 
tive from a Massachusetts district and formerly indifferent 
to slavery, crowned his long public life with its chief glory 
by standing forth as the unconquerable champion of the 



THE ATTACK ON FREE SPEECH 489 

right of petition, — which, he insisted, meant that his con- 
stituents and others had not merely the right to send peti- 
tions to the Congressional waste-paper basket, but the right 
to have their petitions read and considered. Tireless, skill- 
ful, indomitable, unruffled by tirades of abuse, quick to take 
advantage of all parliamentary openings, Adams wore out 
his opponents and roused the country ; and in 1844 the gag 
rule was abandoned. 

Thus while Garrisonian Abolitionists were trying to per- 
suade the North that slavery was a moral wrong to the 
Negro, the folly of the Slave Power called into 
being a new Abolitionist party which thought political 
of slavery first and foremost as dangerous to Aboution- 
Northern rights. This party went into politics 
to limit slavery by all constitutional means in the hope 
of sometime ending it. The "political Abolitionists" were 
strongest in the Middle and North Central States ; and 
among their leading representatives were Birney and the 
young Democratic lawyer, Salmon P. Chase. Says Professor 
Hart, the biographer of the latter : — 

"Like thousands of other antislavery men . . . Chase was 
aroused, not by the wrongs of the slave, but by the dangers to 
free White men. He did not hear the cries of the Covington 
whipping post across the river [the Ohio], but he could not mis- 
take the shouts of the mob which destroyed Birney's property 
and sought his life ; and his earliest act as an antislavery man 
was to stand for the everyday right of a fellow resident of Cin- 
cinnati to express his mind." 



CHAPTER XXIX 

SLAVERY AND EXPANSION 

In 1825 Mexico became independent of Spain (page 407) 
and decreed gradual emancipation of all slaves. In 1835 
Texas wins Santa Anna made himself dictator of the country, 
independ- Texcis was One of the States of Mexico. Its 
^^^^ settlers were mainly from the Southwestern States 

of our Union, They held slaves, and until Santa Anna's 
usurpation, they had had a large amount of self-govern- 
ment. Fearing the loss of these political rights and perhaps 
also the ruin of slavery, they now seceded from Mexico, 
organized an independent state, and chose for their presi- 
dent "Sam" Houston, a famous Indian fighter and an old 
friend of Andrew Jackson. 

In March of 1836, a Mexican army "invaded" Texas, 
and routed several small forces that ventured to stand 
against them. One body of 183 Texans in the Alamo (a 
fortified Mission) held out gallantly for thirteen days — 
which so incensed Santa Anna that he massacred every 
prisoner, April 21, the Mexicans met the main body of 
Texan frontiersmen under Houston at San Jacinto. The 
Texans charged six times their number with the vengeful 
cry, "Remember the Alamo," and won a complete victory. 
The independence of Texas was promptly recognized by 
the United States, Mexico, however, did not give up 
her claims. 

The Texans hoped to be annexed to the United States. 
Indeed, many of them had gone to the country years before 
The ques- with that cxpress plan — as other Americans still 
tion of earlier had gone into West Florida. War between 

annexation ^j^^ United States and the proud and sensitive 
Mexicans would almost certainly follow ; but our South, too, 

490 



ANNEXATION OF TEXAS 491 

clamored for the annexation. Texas was an immense terri- 
tory, and was expected to make at least five slave States. 
The West, also, was eager for more territory, and had few 
scruples against fighting Mexico to get it ; but in the North- 
west there was some opposition to extending the area of 
slavery, and New England opposed annexation fiercely. 

In 1844 President Tyler negotiated with Texas an annexa- 
tion treaty, but the Whig Senate rejected it by a decisive 
vote. Shortly before, John Quincy Adams and twenty-one 
other Northern members of Congress had united in a letter 
to their constituents advising New England to secede from 
the Union if Tyler's "nefarious" scheme went through. The 
Massachusetts legislature responded with resolutions declar- 
ing their State " determined ... to submit to undelegated 
powers in no body of men on earth " [an echo of the 
Kentucky Resolutions of 1799], and asserting that the 
movement to annex Texas, " unless arrested on the thresh- 
old, may tend to drive these States into a dissolution of the 
Union." On the other side, ''fire-eating" Southerners were 
shouting, "Texas or disunion ! " The Slave Power now raised 
the cry that England would get Texas if we did not, and it 
played artfully on the sentiment for expansion. Calhoun 
warned the slave States of the Southwest that ^^^j ^Yye 
England was trying to persuade Texas to abolish demand for 
slavery ; and the Northwest was won over by the '^®^°" 
shrewd device of combining with the demand for Texas a 
demand for "all of Oregon." 

Oregon was a vast territory bounded then by the 42d parallel on 
the South (page 406) and by the line of 54° 40' on the North (page 
409). The agreement with England for "joint occupation" was 
still in force (page 407) ; but of late thousands of emigrants had 
been setting forth from Missouri with the boast that they would 
secure and hold the country for the United States. Twice Eng- 
land had proposed a division of the region ; but the plan had been 
rejected by our government. 

In the spring of 1844, Clay and Van Buren were the 
leading candidates for the Whig and Democratic nominations 



492 SLAVERY AND EXPANSION 

for the presidency. On April 20 they each gave out a public 
letter on political issues, and both advised against agita- 
The cam- ^^^^ ^^^ expansion. The country exclaimed that 
paignof the two leaders were trying in secret conjunction 
^^** to say what the people should not do. The 

Whigs, with some hesitation, submitted, and nominated Clay. 
The Democrats revolted. Three Southern States that had 
instructed delegates for Van Buren called new conventions 
and revoked the instructions. The Democratic National 
Convention nominated James K. Polk, and the platform de- 
clared for "the /^eoccupation of Oregon and the i^eannexation 
of Texas." In the Northwest, Democratic stump orators at 
once added the slogan "Fifty -four forty or fight." This war 
cry was sounded jubilantly in every Democratic meeting in 
the campaign. Some Western leaders did not hesitate to 
promise that their party would also get California and Canada 
for the United States, and hinted even at Mexico and 
Central America. 

The political Abolitionists, under the name of the Liberty 
party, nominated Birney, and drew enough antislavery 
Texas votes from the Whigs in New York to give that 

annexed closc State, and the election, to Polk. Tyler and 
Congress accepted this result as a verdict for annexation ; 
and on the last day of the old administration a "joint 
resolution" of the two Houses of Congress made Texas one 
of the States of the Union (March 3, 1845). Texas, how- 
ever, never consented to be divided, and so the Slave 
Power gained less in the Senate than it had planned. 

Polk's inaugural indicated the intention to take all of 
Oregon, even at the cost of war with England. Such Western 
The Oregon supporters as Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois and 
compromise Lewis Cass of Michigan seemed ready for that 
result. Calhoun and other Southern leaders, however, feared 
that war with England might end in loss of Texas ; Webster, 
powerful in the Senate, stood for compromise, as did also 
some enthusiastic Western expansionists like Benton ; 
England renewed her sensible offer to divide Oregon, by 
extending the boundary line of the 49th parallel (already 



WAR WITH MEXICO 493 

adopted east of the mountains) through the disputed district 
to the Pacific ; and a treaty to this effect was ratified by our 
Senate. The dividing fine was practically identical with 
the Northern watershed of the Columbia ; and it gave us 
all that we could claim on the basis of "occupation," leaving 
to England that half of the district which Englishmen had 
"occupied." The Northwest, however, complained bitterly 
that its interests had been betrayed by the President, and 
that he had surrendered to England's power in order the 
better to prey on Mexico's weakness. 

Polk wanted California also, to which we had no claim 
whatever. He tried to buy, but could not bully Mexico 
into selling the coveted district. But other means war with 
remained. Mexico 

Texas extended without question to the Nueces River. 
Not content with that southern boundary, she claimed to 
the Rio Grande — on grounds at least questionable. For 
the United States to back up this claim was to make war 
with Mexico certain. General Zachary Taylor, in command 
of American troops in Texas, was ordered to move to the 
Rio Grande, where his position threatened a Mexican city 
across the river. The Mexicans demanded a withdrawal. 
Taylor refused, was attacked, won a victory, and crossed 
the river. Polk announced to Congress (May 11, 1846), 
"War exists, and, notwithstanding all our efforts to avoid it, 
exists by the act of Mexico!" Congress accepted the pre- 
text and adopted the war. 

Abolitionists again talked secession. But, outside New 
England, the unjust war was popular. It was waged bril- 
liantly. General Taylor invaded from the north, and Gen- 
eral Winfield Scott advanced from the Gulf, The Mexicans 
were both brave and subtle ; but American armies won amaz- 
ing victories over larger entrenched forces, and the contest 
closed with the spectacular storming of the fortified heights 
of Chapultepec and the capture of the City of Mexico 
(September 15, 1847). 

At the outbreak of the war American troops had been 
dispatched to seize California and New Mexico (territory 



494 SLAVERY AND EXPANSION 

which induded, besides the modern States of those names, 
most of the present Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and parts of 
Gains of Colorado and Wyoming) . In the treaty of peace, 
territory after ceding Texas as far as the Rio Grande, Mexico 
was forced to accept $15,000,000 for this other territory. 
Members of the President's Cabinet wanted to take all of 
Mexico ; Buchanan, Secretary of State, publicly declared, 
"Destiny beckons us to hold and civilize Mexico" ; and the 
press boasted confidently that the American flag in the City 
of Mexico would never be hauled down. But Polk wisely 
insisted upon a more moderate policy, and took (and paid 
for) only what he had offered to buy before he began the 
war. (Cf. map after page 370.) 

A misunderstanding soon arose as to some forty-five 
thousand square miles of the "Mexican cession," just south 
^jjg of the Gila ; and Mexico threatened to fight again 

Gadsden rather than surrender her claim. Finally, in 1853, 
Purchase ^j^^ United States secured full title by paying ten 
million dollars more, through our agent, Gadsden. This 
Gadsden Purchase was the last expansion of our territory 
before the overthrow of slavery ; but it was not the last 
attempt by the Slave Power. Southern politicians had long 
looked with covetous desire at Cuba. Polk offered Spain a 
hundred million dollars for the island, but was refused. Then 
about 1854, Southern leaders were ready for a more extreme 
program, and began frankly to advocate the seizure of Cuba 
Reaching by f orcc. This piratical doctrine was set forth with 
for Cuba particular emphasis in that year in the famous 
Ostend Manifesto, a document published in Europe by a 
group of leading American diplomatic representatives there, 
with James Buchanan among them. When Buchanan 
became President (1857), he renewed the attempts to buy 
Cuba and to secure slave territory in Central America. 
These sinister efforts ceased only when the Civil War began. 

And unscrupulous and violent as this policy was, it had a 
backing in popular sentiment that was not wholly base, as 
was illustrated in 1851 by the Lopez "filibusters," five 
hundred strong, who sailed from New Orleans to invade 



THE OSTEND MANIFESTO 495 

Cuba. Whatever the motives of the statesmen at Wash- 
ington, the filibusters themselves and the Southern people 
back of them were impelled largely by the ancient land 
hunger and spirit of conquest and adventure which had 
brought their ancestors to Virginia and had sent their 
brothers to Texas. 



CHAPTER XXX 

THE STRUGGLE TO CONTROL THE NEW TERRITORY 

Population increased in the decade 1840-1850 from sev- 
enteen to twenty-three millions. Immigration from Europe 
The Slave now took on large proportions. Until 1845, no 
Power's Qj^p year had brought 100,000 immigrants (page 
[hene°w 394).' That year brought 114,000 ; 1847 (during 
territory t^^ Irish famine) brought 235,000; and 1849 
(after the European "year of revolution" ^) brought almost 
300,000. This tremendous current, once started, continued 
unabated to the Civil War. It still came almost wholly 
from the northern European countries, and was composed 
mainly of sturdy laboring men, who naturally avoided the 
South with its slave labor. 

Florida became a State in 1845 ; but Slavery's gain in the 
Senate through the addition of that State and of Texas was 
balanced by the admission of Iowa (1846) and Wisconsin 
(1848). In the lower House of Congress the free States had 
nearly a half more members than the Slave States. This 
situation gave especial importance to the question whether 
slavery or freedom should control the new territory acquired 
from Mexico. All that territory, except Texas, had been 
"free" territory under Mexican law. But in the North- 
west were looming up a band of future "free" common- 
wealths, from Minnesota to Oregon, while outside this 
Mexican cession there was no chance for more Slave States. 

As soon as war began, the President had asked Congress 
for a grant of two million dollars to enable him to negotiate 
The wumot to advantage. It was understood that this money 
Proviso ^g^g i^Q Ijp used as a first payment in satisfying 
Mexico for territory to be taken from her. To this "Two- 

* The German fugitives, after the failure of their gallant attempt at revolution, 
made a notable addition to the forces of Liberty in America. Among them were 
Carl Schurz and Franz Sigel. 

496 



SQUATTER SOVEREIGNTY 497 

Million Dollar Bill" in the House of Representatives, David 
Wilmot, a Pennsylvania Democrat, secured an amendment 
providing that slavery should never exist in any territory 
(outside Texas) to he so acquired. Northwestern Democrats 
voted almost solidly for this " Wilmot Proviso," partly from 
real reluctance to see slavery extended, partly to punish Polk 
and the Slave Power for "betraying" the Northwest in the 
Oregon matter. 

The session expired (August, 1846) before a vote was 
reached in the Senate. In the next session the Proviso again 
passed the lower House, but was voted down 
in the Senate, where the Slave Power had now doctrine: 
rallied. Then (February, 1848) Calhoun pre- Ij"^"?''^^ 
sented the Southern program in a set of resolu- 
tions affirming that, since the territories were the common 
domain of all the States, Congress had no constitutional 
power to forbid the people of any part of the Union, 
with their 'property, from seeking homes in that domain. 
This meant, of course, the right of Southerners to carry 
their slaves — and slave law — into any "Territory." Then, 
said the South, when the time for Statehood arrives, let the 
inhabitants of each Territory decide the matter of slavery 
or freedom for themselves. 

This was the doctrine to be known later as '^squatter sov- 
ereignty'" or "popular sovereignty." It appealed shrewdly 
to a liking for fair play, in claiming that the South "simply 
asked not to be denied equal rights ... in the common 
public domain." Even more powerfully it appealed to the 
democratic instincts of the West, claiming merely to turn 
the whole question over to the people most interested — 
although, as Abraham Lincoln was soon to point out, it 
failed to consult the slaves — the people most interested. 

Some Northern congressmen now deserted the Wilmot 
Proviso in favor of "non-intervention by Congress," while 
others favored extending the old line of the The election 
Missouri Compromise to the Pacific. Finally, °^ ^®*^ 
the country went into the presidential election of 1848 with- 
out having settled any civil government for the vast area 



498 SLAVERY OR FREEDOM 

recently acquired. This neglect was serious. New Mexico 
and California were seats of ancient Spanish settlement at 
such centers as Santa Fe and the various Missions near San 
Francisco ; and the sensitive and highly civilized popula- 
tion resented military government by the American con- 
querors. Moreover, in January, 1848, just before the 
cession by Mexico, gold was discovered in California at 
Sutter's Fort (now Sacramento). Then followed a vast and 
varied immigration, which needed imperatively a settled 
government. 

The Whigs, who had won their one success with General 
Harrison, now repeated their tactics of 1840. They adopted 
no platform whatever, and nominated Zachary Taylor, 
of Louisiana, a slaveholder, a straightforward soldier, and 
the hero of the war. The Democratic platform evaded all 
mention of slavery and of the burning Territorial ques- 
tion ; but the presidential candidate was Lewis Cass of 
Michigan, the originator of the '"popular sovereignty''' plan 
for Territories. 

The antislavery Democrats had hoped to nominate Van 
Buren, who for a time had the strongest vote in the Con- 
vention.^ An antislavery faction of New York Democrats 
("Barnburners" ^) finally seceded from the Convention and 
did place Van Buren in nomination. A few weeks later, he 
was nominated also by a new Free Soil party, which had 
absorbed the Liberty party. The Free Soilers recognized 
frankly that Congress could not interfere with slavery in the 
States, but they insisted on its prohibition in the Territories, 
with the cry, "Free Speech, Free Labor, Free Soil, and Free 
Men.'' They cast 300,000 votes (five times as many as the 
Liberty party four years before). In most of the country, 

^ Democratic National Conventions long used a "two-thirds rule," in making 
nominations. Other parties nominated by a majority vote. 

2 This name, derived from a campaign story of a Dutchman who burned his barn 
to get rid of the rats, was applied in derision, because the faction avowed a willing- 
ness to ruin its party rather than permit slavery in the Territories. The "regular" 
faction of the Democratic party in New York became known as Old Hunkers. Party 
epithets were growing bitter. Cass and other Northern men who showed subser- 
viency to the Slave Power were coming to be derided as "Doughfaces." 



SQUATTER SOVEREIGNTY 409 

they drew mainly from the Whigs ; but in New York their 
Barnburner allies drew from Cass just enough to give that 
State (and the election) to the Whigs. 

Meantime, California, lacking even a Territorial govern- 
ment, grew to the stature of Statehood. Thousands of 
"Forty-niners," from all quarters of the globe (but caUfornia 
mainly from the Northern States of the Union), and the 
rushed to the rich gold fields : some around Cape ^'sUantes 
Horn by ship ; some by way of the Isthmus ; but more by 
wagon train across the Plains, defying Indians and the more 
terrible Desert, along trails marked chiefly by the bleach- 
ing skeletons of their forerunners. And on the Pacific coast 
itself, whenever rumor reported that some prospector had 
"struck it rich," distant camps and towns were depopulated 
to swell the roaring new settlement, — toward which, over 
mountain paths, streamed multitudes of reckless men, laden 
with spade, pickax, and camp utensils. In a few months, 
the mining region contained some eighty thousand adven- 
turers. To maintain rude order and restrain rampant crime, 
the better spirits among the settlers adopted regulations 
and organized Vigilance Committees to enforce them, with 
power of life and death. 

On taking oflSce, President Taylor at once advised New 
Mexico and California to organize their own State govern- 
ments and apply for admission to the Union. The Cali- 
fornians acted promptly on this suggestion, and (November, 
1849) a convention unanimously adopted a "free State" 
constitution, Taylor sought to keep faith, and urged Con- 
gress to admit the new State. The Slave Power raged at 
seeing the richest fruits of the Mexican War slipping from its 
grasp. The country was aflame. Every Northern legis- 
lature but one passed resolutions declaring that Congress 
ought to shut out slavery from all the new territory. In 
the South, public meetings and legislatures urged secession 
if such action were taken. Said Toombs of Georgia in 
Congress, "I . . . avow ... in the presence of the living 
God, that if . . . you seek to drive us from California, . . . 
I am for disunion." 



500 



SLAVERY OR FREEDOM 



Taylor died suddenly in July, 1850, to be succeeded by 
Fillmore from the vice-presidency. This gave a breathing 
, spell, and Clay came forward once more with a 

" Compro- compromise, aiming to reconcile the South to the 
^50"* loss of California by giving them their will on 
other disputed points. Proud of his title of "the 
Great Pacificator," he pled for "a union of hearts" between 




North and South through mutual concession : otherwise, 
he feared there was little chance for the survival of the polit- 
ical Union which he loved. 



THE LAST COMPROMISE, IN 1850 501 

Clay's "Omnibus" measures were supported by the new 
President, and finally passed in separate bills after a stren- 
uous eight months' debate. They provided for: (1) the 
admission of the "free" California; (2) Territorial organ- 
ization of New Mexico and Utah on "squatter-sovereignty" 
principles ; (3) prohibition of the slave trade in the District of 
Columbia ; and (4) a new and more effective Fugitive Slave 
Law, with all the abominations of the old one. This was the 
"'Compromi.se of 1850,'' — the last compromise on slavery. 
Many Southern Representatives voted No, in order that 
the measure, if passed, should be passed by Northern votes. 

It 2vas Webster ivho really secured the passage of the com- 
promise. He had bitterly opposed the annexation of Texas 
and the war : but now he urged that the North 

. Webster s 

owed concession to the weaker South. More- ■ seventh 
over, slave labor, he was sure, could never be of March' 

speech 

profitable in sterile New Mexico. It was al- 
ready excluded "by the law of nature." He "would 
not take pains to reenact the will of God." To-day the 
historical student is inclined to say that this "Seventh of 
March" speech was dictated by deep love for the Union. 
Webster never had been optimistic in temperament. Now 
an old man, he did not venture to hope that there could 
ever be a better Union, while he even began to despair of 
the existing one unless the South was pacified. At the 
moment, however, the antislavery men of the North felt 
that he played a traitor's part to the cause of liberty, in 
order to secure Southern support for the presidency. The 
finest expression of this antislavery wrath is in the stern 
condemnation of Whittier's Ichabod : — 

"From those great eyes 
The soul has fled. 
When faith is lost, when honor dies. 
The man is dead. 

"Then, pay the reverence of old days 
To his dead fame. 
Walk backward, with averted gaze. 
And hide the shame." 



502 SLAVERY OR FREEDOM 

And Emerson wrote with barbed insight: "Mr. Webster, 
p€=rhaps, is only following the laws of his blood and con- 
stitution. . . . He is a man who lives by his memory : a 
man of the past ; not a man of faith and hope. All the drops 
of his blood have eyes that look doumumrd.^' And says Rhodes 
{History, I, 153) of Webster's advocacy of the Fugitive Slave 
Law: "Webster could see 'an ordinance of nature' and 
'the will of God' written on the mountains and plateaus of 
New Mexico ; but he failed to see . . . the will of God im- 
planted in the hearts of freemen." 

Calhoun, dying and despairing, opposed the compromise 
as insufficient. If the North wished to preserve the Union, 
Calhoun's ^^ urged, it must concede some kind of political 
dissatis- equilibrium between itself and the weaker South, 
action jj-g papers show that he meant to propose an 

amendment to the Constitution providing for two Presidents, 
one from each section, with a mutual veto. But like his 
great rivals, Clay and Webster, he passed from political life 
in this debate. 

More significant than the attitude of these statesmen 
of a passing day was the appearance of a new group of 
Seward's autislavcry men, led by William H. Seward of 
" Higher Ncw York. Like Calhoun, Seward opposed the 
*^ compromise, but for opposite reasons. He in- 

sisted that peace between the sections could come only 
with the extinction of slavery. As to the Territories, said 
he: "The Constitution devotes the Domain to . . . liberty. 
. . . But there is a higher law than the Constitution, 
which devotes it to the same noble purpose." For the 
moment, Webster and Clay prevailed. But the "Higher- 
Law" speech was to exert more lasting influence than the 
speech of "the Seventh of March." 



CHAPTER XXXI 

THE BREAKDOWN OF COMPROMISE 

It has been fitly said that the Union was maintained 
from 1789 to 1820 hy the comfromises in the Constitution, and 
from 1820 to 1861 hy Conqressional compromises. ^, ^ . . 
PoHtical leaders and the mass of the people were slave law 
desperately anxious to convince themselves that "*'"^ *^® . 

1/^ . p f- r>i* PI Compromise 

the Compromise oi 1850 was nnal. Any lurtner 
discussion of slavery was severely reprobated by many 
Northern men. But, exclaimed James Russell Lowell, 
"To tell us that we ought not to agitate • the question 
of slavery, when it is that which is forever agitating us, 
is like telling a man with the ague to stop shaking and 
he will be cured." The Fugitive Slave law kept men think- 
ing about slavery. That law was the great mistake of 
the Slave Power. Had the South been content to lose the 
few slaves who escaped into free States,^ the compromise 
might have endured years longer. In his "Higher Law" 
speech, Seward had warned the South: "You are entitled 
to no more stringent laws, and such laws would be useless. 
The cause of the inefficiency of the present statute is not 
at all the leniency of its provisions : it is the public sentiment 
of the North. . . . Your Constitution and laws convert 
hospitality to the veingee . . . into a crime; but all mankind 
except you esteem that hospitality a virtue." And Emerson 
called the law "a law which every one of you will break on 
the earliest occasion — a law which no man can obey, or 
abet, without loss of self-respect and forfeiture of the name 
of gentleman." 

The law could be applied to Negroes who had been living 
for years in the North in supposed safety — since the break- 

1 From 1830 to 1860 the number averaged not more than 1000 a year. A small 
insurance would have protected the owners. 

503 



504 SLAVERY OR FREEDOM 

down of the law of 1793. Thousands now abandoned 
their homes for hurried flight to Canada ; and some were 
actually seized by slave hunters. More attempts to re- 
capture fugitive slaves took place in 1851 than in all our 



PROCLAMATION ! ! 

TO ALL 

THE GOOD PEOPLE OF MASSACHUSETTS! 

Be it known that there are now 
THREE SLAVE-HUNTERS OR KIDNAPPERS 

IN BOSTON 

Looking for their prey. One of them is called 
"DAVIS." 

He is an unusually ill-looking fellow, about five feet eight inches high, 
wide-shouldered. He has a big mouth, black hair, and a good deal of dirty 
bushy hair on the lower part of his face. He has a Roman nose ; one of his 
eyes has been knocked out. He looks Hke a Pirate, and knows how to be 
a Stealer of Men. 

The next is called 
EDWARD BARRETT. 

He is about five feet six inches high, thin and lank, is apparently about 
thirty years old. His nose turns up a little. He has a long mouth, long 
thin ears, and dark eyes. His hair is dark, and he has a bunch of fur on 
his chin. ... He wears his shirt collar turned down, and has a. black 
string — not of hemp — ■ about his neck. 

The third ruffian is named 

ROBERT M. BACON, alias JOHN D. BACON. 

He is about fifty years old, five feet and a half high. He has a red, 
intemperate-looking face, and a retreating forehead. His hair is dark, and 
a little gray. He wears a black coat, mixed pants, and a purplish vest. He 
looks sleepy, and yet malicious. 

Given at Boston, this 4th day of April, in the year of our Lord, 1851, and 
of the Independence of the United States the eighty-fourth. 

God save the Commonwealth of Massachusetts ! 



An Antislavery Handbill of 1851, parodying advertisements for escaped slaves. 

From Rhodes, I, 212. 

history before. But now every seizure caused a tumult — 
Personal- if not a riot. Even "proslavery" men in the 
liberty laws North could not stand for the hunting of slaves 
at their own doors. Legislatures refused to United States 



COMPROMISE BREAKS DOWN 505 

officials the use of State jails, forbade State officers to aid 
in executing the law, and enacted various ''personal-liberty 
laws," to secure to any man seized as an escaped slave those 
rights of jury trial and legal privilege which the Federal law 
denied him. Some of these State laws amounted to down- 
right Nullification.^ The "Underground Railroad"- was 
extended. In several cases, fugitives were rescued from the 
officers in full day by "mobs" of such high-minded gentle- 
men as Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Samuel J. May, and 
Gerrit Smith. These men sometimes avowed their deed in 
the public press, and challenged prosecution ; and all at- 
tempts to punish broke down, because no jury would convict. 
When a slave was returned, the recapture usually proved to 
have cost the master more than the man could be sold for. 
Still, in the campaign of 1852, the platforms of both the 
leading parties indorsed the "Compromise" emphatically,^ 
with express reference also to the Fugitive Slave The election 
provision ; and when Charles Sumner in the Senate °* ^^^^ 
moved the repeal of that law, he found only three votes to 
support him. In the presidential election, too, the Free 
Soil vote ("Free Democracy," now) fell off a half; and 
General Scott, the Whig candidate, who was believed to be 
more liberal than his platform, was easily defeated by 
Franklin Pierce, who gave the Compromise his hearty 
support. 

One feature of the election of 1852 was the prominence of 
a new political party which called itself the American party, 

^ The Wisconsin legislative resolutions of 1859 used the words of the old Ken- 
tucky Resolutions of 1799. 

2 An arrangement among Abolitionists in the Border States for concealing fugi- 
tives and forwarding them to Canada. The system had its "stations," "junctions," 
"conductors," and so on. 

' The tendency among respectable classes at the North to cling to the Com- 
promise was especially notable in the Eastern colleges, — where there were many 
students from the South. Andrew D. White says that in the Yale of the early 
fifties (when he was a student there), "the great majority of older professors spoke 
at public meetings in favor of proslavery compromises," though, "except for a few 
theological doctrinaires," their personal sympathies were against slavery. The two 
great Yale professors of the day who opposed the Fugitive Slave law, he adds, were 
generally condemned for " hurting Yale," and driving away Southern students. 



506 SLAVERY OR P^REEDOM 

but which is better known by the appellation of Know- 
nothings. From the time of the Philadelphia Convention, 
The Know- bitter attempts had been made now and again to 
nothings limit the political influence of foreign immigrants. 
To this "native" prejudice there was added, after the Irish 
immigration of the late forties, a silly fear of "Catholic" 
domination. The new party was a secret society, with in- 
tricate ramifications and elaborate hierarchy. Its purpose 
was to exclude from office all but native-born and all not in 
sympathy with this program ; but members below the high- 
est grade of oflBcials were pledged to passive obedience to 
orders, and were instructed, when questioned as to party 
secrets, to reply, "I know nothing." The movement was 
bigoted in character and un-American in methods ; but it 
gained considerable strength in eastern and southern States, 
and elected several congressmen. In part, the movement 
drew its strength from the desire to ignore slavery and find 
new issues. 

What slim chance there was that the North might quiet 
down under the iniquity of the Fugitive Slave law was 
^, „ now finally dissipated by another audacious meas- 

TheKansas- . , . ^ „ "^ , „, 

Nebraska ure m the interests oi slavery, ihe vast region 
fa-ik^^^^ from Missouri and Iowa to the Rockies was 

known as the Platte country. Immigrants to 
California were pouring across it ; and at the assembling of 
Congress in December, 1853, Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, 
chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories, strove 
to secure a Territorial organization for the region. But 
his Kansas-Nebraska bill proposed that two new Terri- 
tories there should be placed on the squatter-sovereignty 
basis as to slavery. 

Douglas and President Pierce put forward the surprising 
claim that the Compromise of 1850 implied this form of 
Repeals the Organization for all Territories thereafter formed. 
Compromise But this district was part of the Old Louisiana 

Purchase, solemnly guaranteed to freedom by the 
Compromise of 1820. The Compromise of 1850 had ap- 



COMPROMISE BREAKS DOWN 



507 




508 SLAVERY OR FREEDOM 

plied only to territory just acquired from Mexico : no one 
had dreamed then that it was to repeal the Missouri Com- 
promise for old territory. The Southern congressmen had 
not asked such a thing ; but now, after a gasp of aston- 
ishment, they seized their chance. 

Most Northerners looked upon the move as a wanton 
violation of a sacred pledge ; but the bill carried by a close 
vote, — in the House, 113 to 100. Douglas tried to make 
the bill a party measure ; but it ended as a sectional meas- 
ure. Half the Northern Democrats voted against it — 
though all the President's power of patronage was used to 
whip them into line — and the other half, almost to a man, 
lost their seats at the next election. All Southern congress- 
men but nine, Whigs or Democrats, voted for it. 

Now the struggle for " Bleeding Kansas " was transferred 
to the country at large. From Missouri thousands of armed 
" Bleeding slavc-owucrs poured across the line to preempt 
Kansas" land — which, however, few of them made any 
pretense of really settling. From the North, especially 
from distant New England, came thousands of true settlers, 
financed often by the "Emigrant Aid Society," and 
armed with the new breech-loading Sharpe's rifle, to 
save Kansas for freedom. In like fashion, far-off Georgia 
sent her contingent of the "Sons of the South" reli- 
giously dedicated to the cause of slavery. But once 
more slavery proved its weakness. In spite of the neigh- 
borhood of slave territory, it was not easy to move 
slave plantations to a new State, especially to one not 
particularly adapted to slave labor ; and the free-State 
settlers soon predominated in numbers. 

The first Territorial legislature was carried by "Border 
Ruffians" from across the Missouri line. A preliminary 
"census" had shown only 2905 voters in the Territory. On 
the evening before the election day, "an unkempt, sun- 
dried, blatant, picturesque mob of five thousand Missourians, 
with guns on their shoulders, revolvers stuflSng their belts, 
bowie knives protruding from their boot-tops, and generous 
rations of whisky in their wagons," drove madly across the 



BLEEDING KANSAS 509 

border, seized all but one of the polling places, and swamped 
the "free-State" vote. The proslavery legislature, so 
elected, unseated the few "free-State" members, and 
passed stringent laws to protect slavery. The free-State 
settlers tried to disregard this fraudulent government 
(January, 1856), and it was denounced also by the honest 
and fearless governor, Andrew H. Reeder, who had been 
appointed as a strong proslavery man. But President 
Pierce removed Reeder and supported the proslavery 
legislature with United States troops. Actual war followed 
in Kansas between rival proslavery and free-State "govern- 
ments," and bloody murders were committed both by raiders 
from Missouri and by free-State fanatics like John Brown.^ 

In the debate on the Nebraska bill, Sumner had declared 
that it "annuls all past compromises, and makes future com- 
promises impossible. It puts freedom and slavery face to 
face, and bids them grapple." And said Emerson: ''The 
Fugitive law did much to unglue the eyes; and now the Ne- 
braska bill leaves ns staring." 

That rash measure had coalized the discordant antislavery 
elements throughout the country into one political party. 
"Anti-Nebraska men" (Free Soilers, Northern Birth of the 
Whigs, Northern Democrats opposed to Douglas' Republican 
measure) dreiv together under the name Republican. ^^^ 
This party took from the Free Soilers the program of pro- 
hibiting slavery in all "Territories." It adopted from the 
Whigs, who rallied to it in large numbers, their broad- 
construction views. And it recognized its Democratic ele- 
ment by nominating as its first candidate for President a 
young oflBcer belonging to that party, John C. Fremont. 
The name Republican was designed to indicate the purpose 
of going back to the true democracy of Jefferson's original 
"Republican" party. 

The first Republican National Convention (1856) con- 

1 Brown was quite ready to take life, or to give his own, in fighting "the sum 
of all villanies," but he must not be confounded vAth "ordinary criminals." His 
killings represented a blind revolt of the moral sense against an unrighteous system. 
They were somewhat similar to the crimes by maddened enthusiasts in the cause of 
social reform. 



510 SLAVERY OR FREEDOM 

tained representatives from all the free States and from 
Maryland, Delaware, and Kentucky. The platform asserted 
that under the Constitution neither Congress nor any 
Territorial legislature had authority to establish slavery in 
a Territory, urged a railway across the continent, and 
pledged liberal aid to commerce by river and harbor im- 
provement. Despite the sweeping statement regarding 
slavery in the Territories, the party, down to the War, 
affirmed steadfastly that Congress had no right to interfere 
with the institution i?i the States; and its leaders reviled 
Abolitionists almost as violently as the Southerners did. 

In the election, Fremont carried all the Northern States 
but four. The Know-nothings carried Maryland. The 
The election Democrats elected their candidate, James Buchanan, 
of 1856 jjy 2jj^ electoral votes to 111^. The Republicans, 
however, in this first contest, mustered 1,300,000 votes, to 
1,800,000 for the Democrats. 

And then (March, 1857) came the Dred Scott decision, in 
which the Supreme Court declared that both North and 
The Dred South Were trying to stand upon unconstitutional 
Scott ground — with a difference. Dred Scott was the 

ecision slave of an army officer. In 1834 his owner had 
taken him to an army post in Illinois, and, later, to one in 
what is now Minnesota ; and then back to Missouri. Slavery 
could not legally exist in Illinois, because of the Northwest 
Ordinance, or in Minnesota, because of the Missouri Com- 
promise ; and, some years later, Scott sued for his freedom 
on the ground that he became free legally when he resided 
in that free territory. 

The case finally reached the Supreme Court. That 
august body held that Scott was still a slave and had no 
.« ^ standing in court ; ^ and two thirds of the Court ^ 

Affirms that i • i <. i i hip 

slavery Concurred in the further and uncalled-ior opinion 

Miows the of the Chief Justice (Roger B. Taney) that neither 

Congress nor Territorial legislature could legally 

forbid slavery in a Territory. The Constitution, said the 

' Scott was at once freed by his owner. 

- Justices Curtis and McLean presented powerful dissenting opinions. 



REPUBLICANS DEFY THE COURT 511 

Court, sanctioned property in slaves, and every citizen of 
the Union must have his property protected in any part of 
the common national domain. Only a State could abolish 
slavery. 

This was a sweeping adoption of Calhoun's contention, 
and the precise reverse of Republican doctrine. According 
to this dictum, the restriction upon slavery in the Missouri 
Compromise had always been void in law, even before re- 
pealed by the Nebraska Act. Quite as clearly, the opinion 
denied the ''popular sovereignty'" idea. But in exchange 
for this ground which it was told to surrender, the South 
was offered still more advanced and impregnable pro- 
slavery ground, while the Republican party was branded as 
seeking an end wholly unconstitutional and illegitimate 
by any means. It must surrender, or defy the Court — 
"that part of our government on which all the rest hinges." 

Without hesitation, the Republican leaders defied the 
Court. Said Seward in the Senate: "The Supreme Court 
attempts to command the people of the United ^j^^ .. q^^^ 
States to accept the principle that one man can of last 
own other men ; and that they must guarantee ^^^°^ 
the inviolability of that false and pernicious property. The 
people . . . never can, and they never will, accept prin- 
ciples so unconstitutional and abhorrent. . . . We shall 
reorganize the Court, and thus reform its political senti- 
ments and practices, and bring them into harmony with 
the Constitution and the laws of nature.'^ Lincoln, in 
public debate, even accused the Court of entering into a 
plot with Pierce, Douglas, and Buchanan. Other North- 
erners foresaw Civil War. James Russell Lowell, on hear- 
ing of the Court's decision, wrote to Charles Eliot Norton, 
in Italy: "I think it will do good. It makes slavery 
national, as far as the Supreme Court can. So now the 
lists are open, and ive shall soon see where the stouter lance 
shafts are grown. North or South.^^ More temperately, but 
quite as decidedly, the influential Springfield Republican 
said : "In this country, the court of last resort is the people. 
They will discuss and review the action of the Supreme 



512 SLAVERY OR FREEDOM 

Court, and, if it presents itself as a practical issue, they will 
vote against it.'' 

The congressional elections of the next year showed 
great Republican gains. The campaign was made famous 
by a series of joint debates in Illinois between 
Lincoln- Douglas (the "Little Giant'*) and Abraham Lin- 
Dougias coin, candidates for the Senate. Lincoln was 
defeated, but he attained his deliberate purpose. 
His acute and persistent questions forced Douglas to 
choose between the new doctrine of the Supreme Court 
— to which the South now clung vociferously — and his 
own old doctrine of squatter sovereignty — which was 
certainly as far as Illinois would go. If he placed him- 
self in opposition to the Supreme Court, he would not be 
able to secure Southern support for the presidency at the 
next election, to which men's eyes were already turned. 
If he did not oppose the Court, he would lose the Senator- 
ship and Northern support for the presidency. In any 
case, the Slavery party would be robbed of its most for- 
midable candidate in 1860. Douglas was driven to maintain 
that, despite the Dred Scott decision, a Territorial legislature 
could keep out slavery by "unfriendly legislation." This 
doctrine was at once denounced bitterly by the South. 

Even more significant was the moral stand taken by 
Lincoln. The real issue, he declared, was the right or wrong 
of slavery, — not any constitutional theory : " It is the 
eternal struggle between these two principles — right and 
wrong — throughout the world. They are the two principles 
which have stood face to face from the beginning of time, 
and ivhich will ever continue to struggle. The one is the 
common right of humanity : the other is the divine right 
of kings. [Slavery] is the spirit that says, ' You work and 
toil and earn bread, and I'll eat it.' No matter in what 
shape it comes, it is the same tyrannical principle." 

In 1857 the free-State men won the Kansas elections so 
overwhelmingly that the proslavery organization could no 
longer expect open support from Washington. The ex- 



GAINS FOR FREEDOM 513 

piring proslavery legislature, however, still provided for a 
proslavery convention, which met at Lecompton (Novem- 
ber, 1857). President Buchanan had purchased The Federal 
for that body the privilege of meeting in peace government 
by promising that its work should be submitted slave Power 
to popular vote. This pledge was not kept. The •" Kansas 
convention arranged a "constitution with slavery" and a 
"constitution with no slavery," which last, however, left in 
bondage the slaves then in the Territory, and forbade the 
residence of free Negroes. At the promised election, the 
voters were permitted merely to choose between these two 
constitutions: they were given no opportunity to reject 
both. 

The free-State men kept away from the polls ; and the 
"constitution with slavery" carried overwhelmingly, six 
thousand to less than six hundred. But the new free-State 
legislature provided for a new and proper expression of 
opinion. This time the proslavery men abstained from 
voting ; and the two constitutions together received less 
than two hundred votes, to more than ten thousand against 
both of them. Still, the South and the Administration at 
Washington strove violently to secure the admission of the 
State with the "Lecompton constitution," claiming the 
first election as valid. 

This nefarious attempt to rob the people of their will was 
defeated by the warm opposition of Douglas, who remained 
true to his doctrine of popular sovereignty. The Slave 
Power succeeded, however, in getting Congress to submit 
the Lecompton constitution for the third time to the people 
of Kansas, with a bribe of public lands if they would accept 
it. Kansas refused the bribe, 11,000 to 2000. Even then 
the Democratic Senate would not admit the State with its 
"free" constitution, and Kansas statehood had to wait till 
1861. Meantime, two other free States came in, to 
establish Northern supremacy in the Senate, — Minnesota 
(1858) and Oregon (1859). 

In one other vital matter at this same time the Slave Power 
ofiFended the moral sense and threatened the material interest 



514 SLAVERY OR FREEDOM 

of "free" labor. As early as 1845, Andrew Johnson of 
Tennessee (page 437) introduced in Congress the first 

''Homestead biir' — to give every homeless citizen 
vetoes the a farm from the public lands. Several times 
Homestead guch bills passed the House. But larger free 

immigration into the public domain would end all 
chance to set up slavery there ; and the Slave Power, 
formerly favorable to a liberal land policy, now defeated 
all these bills in the Senate. This new attitude of the Slave 
Power helped to make the masses of the North see the 
fundamental opposition between free and slave labor. On 
the other hand, the antislavery parties appealed to Northern 
workingmen by their position on this matter. The Free 
Soilers declared in their platform of 1852, in full accord with 
the labor parties of twenty years before : — 

"The public land of the United States belongs to the people, and 
should not be sold to individuals or granted to corporations, but 
should be held as a sacred trust for the benefit of the people, and 
should be granted in limited quantities, free of cost, to landless 
settlers." 

In June of 1860 the House again passed a Homestead bill 
giving any head of a family a quarter section after five 
years' residence thereon. The Republican platform of the 
same year "demanded" the passing by the Senate of that 
"complete and satisfactory measure," protesting also 
"against any view of the free homestead policy which 
regards the settlers as paupers or suppliants for public 
bounty." This time the Senate did pass the bill, but Bu- 
chanan vetoed it. "The honest poor man," argued the Presi- 
dent with gracious rhetoric, "by frugality and industry 
can in any part of our country acquire a competency. . . . 
He desires no charity. . . . This bill will go far to de- 
moralize the people and repress this noble spirit of independ- 
ence. It may introduce among us those pernicious social 
theories which have proved so disastrous in other countries." 
When the Slave Power withdrew from Congress, a Home- 
stead bill at last became law — in May, 1862. 



i 



JOHN BROWN 515 

Two other events must be noticed, before we take up the 
fateful election of 1860. 

1. In 1859 John Brown tried to arouse a slave insurrection 
in Virginia, He seems hardly to have comprehended the 
hideous results that would have followed a sue- j , 

John 

cessful attempt. He planned to establish a camp Browns 
in the mountains to which Negro fugitives might I'^surrection 
rally ; and his little force of twenty-two men seized the 
arsenal at Harpers Ferry, to get arms for slave recruits. 
The neighboring slaves did not rise, as he had hoped they 
would, and he was captured after a gallant defense. Vir- 
ginia gave him a fair trial ; and he was convicted of murder 
and of treason against that commonwealth. His death 
made him more formidable to slavery than ever he had 
been living. The North in general condemned his action ; 
but its condemnation was tempered by a note of sympathy 
and admiration ominous to Southern ears. Emerson de- 
clared that Brown's execution made "the scaffold glorious 
— like the Cross." 

2. In 1852 Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe had written 
Uncle Tom's Cabin, one of the greatest moral forces ever 
contained between book covers. The volume un- ^^^^^^ 
doubtedly misrepresented slavery, — as though Tom^s 
exceptional incidents had been the rule ; but it ° '" 

did its great work in making the people of the North realize 
that the slave was a fellow man for whom any slavery was 
hateful. The tremendous influence of the book, however, 
was not really felt for some years. The boys of fourteen 
who read it in 1852 were just ready to give their vote to 
Abraham Lincoln in 1860. This explains, too, in part, why 
the college youth who had been generally proslavery in 
1850 left college halls vacant in 1861 to join the Northern 
armies. 



CHAPTER XXXII 

ON THE EVE OF THE FINAL STRUGGLE 
AMERICA IN 1860 

To most men of the time these years 1845-1860 had a 
more engrossing aspect than was afforded by the slavery 
Rapid struggle. The era was one of wonderful material 

growth of prosperity. Wealth increased fourfold, — for the 
^^ first time in our history faster than population. 

Men were absorbed in a mad race to seize the new oppor- 
tunities. They had to stop, in some degree, for the slavery 
discussion ; but the majority looked upon that as an annoy- 
ing interruption to the real business of life. 

Between 1850 and 1857, railway mileage multiplied enor- 
mously ; and in the North the map took on its modern 
Railway gridiron look. Lines reached the Mississippi at 
mileage ^gj^ points ; and sorne projected themselves into 
the unsettled plains beyond. With the railway, or ahead 
of it, spread the telegraph. Mail routes, too, took advantage 
of rail transportation ; and in 1850 postage was lowered 
from 5 cents for 300 miles to 3 cents for 3000 miles. With 
cheap and swift transportation and communication, the era 
of commercial combinations began, and great fortunes piled 
up beyond all previous dreams. The new money kings, 
railway barons, and merchant princes of the North, it was 
noted, joined hands with the great planters of the South in 
trying to stifle opposition to slavery — because all such 
agitation "hurt business." 

For labor, too, the period ivas a golden age. Between 1840 
and 1860, wages rose twenty per cent, and prices only two 
Labor per cent. Pauperism was unobtrusive, and, to 

prosperous foreign observers, amazingly rare. Inventions 
had multiplied comforts and luxuries. Pianos from Ger- 

516 




RAILROAD CONSTRUCTION 
From 1830 to 1860 



» 1830-1840 

1840-1850 - 

■' 1850-1860 

SCALE OF MILES 

100 200 300 400 



INDUSTRIES AND TRADE 517 

many were seen in Western villages, and French silks 
sometimes found their way to the counter of a cross-roads 
store. Western farmers moved from their old log cabins 
into two-story frame houses, painted white, with green 
blinds. That same rather bare sort of building was the 
common "town" house also in the West — varied, however, 
by an occasional more pretentious and often more ugly 
"mansion" of brick or stone. Artistic domestic architec- 
ture did not appear until about 1900. 

New England and New York had learned the lesson of 
conservative banking ; but in the West most banks were 
still managed recklessly. In 1857, accordingly, came an- 
other "panic," due, like that of 1837, to speculation, wild 
inflation of credit, and premature investment of borrowed 
capital in enterprises that could give no immediate return. 
This time, however, the country recovered quickly. 

The twenty years preceding the Civil War saw an indus- 
trial transformation due to the development of farm machinery 
One farm laborer in 1860 could produce more than Deveiop- 
three in 1840. Until 1850, the dominant agricul- ment of 
tural interest of the United States had been the cWnery*' 
cotton and tobacco of the South. After that and its 
date, it became the grain of the Northwest. For ^^^ * 
that section, McCormick's reaper worked a revolution 
akin to that worked for the South a half-century earlier by 
Whitney's cotton gin. 

Until 1850, too, the more distant parts of the West, — • 
Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, southern Illinois, 
— had remained tributary commercially to New Orleans, 
by the river. Now this Northwest suddenly changed front. 
Farm machinery and the railway made it possible for it to 
feed the growing Eastern cities and even to export the 
surplus to Europe from Eastern ports. And this change in 
trade routes was more than economic. It completed the 
break in the old 'political alliance of South and West — 
already begun by the moral awakening on slavery — and 
foreshadowed a new political alliance of East and West. 
The merit of the Compromise of 1850 in our history is that 



518 



AMERICA IN 1860 



it put off the war until this alliance was cemented and the 
Northwest was, body and soul, on the side of the Union. 

In yet another way the improved reapers and threshers may 
he said to have icon the Civil War. Without such machinery, 
Northern grain fields could never have spared the men who 
marched with Grant and Sherman. As it was, with half its 
men under arms, the Northwest increased its farm output. 




Harvesting in 1831. McCormick's first successful horse-reaper — the first im- 
provement upon the cradle scythe. The "self-binder" was a later feature. 
From a photograph based upon a "reconstruction" by the International Har- 
vester Company. 



The acquisition of California had been followed by a 
swift expansion of trade with Asia. Hawaii had been 
Trade with brought uiidcr American influence previously by 
the Orient American missionaries and traders; and in 1844 
China was persuaded to open up five "treaty ports" to 
American trade. Japan continued to exclude foreigners 
until 1854, when Commodore Perry, in pursuance of orders 
from Washington, entered Japanese ports with his fleet of 
warships and secured a commercial treaty. 



I 



1 



INDUSTRIES AND TRADE 



519 



After the discovery of gold in California (and with the 
opening of these prospects of Oriental trade) the question of 
transportation across the Isthmus of Panama ^j^^ ^^ 
arose. Great Britain and the United States each ton-Buiwer 
tried to secure routes for a canal from ocean to *^®^^y 
ocean ; but in 1850 the Clayton-Bulwer treaty agreed that 
anv canal across those narrow lands should be neutral, and 




Harvesting To-day. A Mogul Kerosene Tractor pulling two McCormick reapers 
and binders with mechanical shockers. The tractor is managed by the man 
on the front reaper. Two men take the place of six human beings in the previous 
cut and do many times as much work, in much greater comfort. This, of course, 
is a development much later than the Civil War. 

subject to common control by the two countries. In 1855 a 
railway was opened across the Isthmus. 

The ambitious project of an American railway from the 
Mississippi to the Pacific was agitated constantly after 
1850; and in 1861, encouraged by prospects of a govern- 
ment subsidy, the Western Union carried a telegraph line 
across the mountains to San Francisco. Travel from St. 
Louis to San Francisco, by relays of armed stage coaches, 
took four weeks ; but mail was carried in ten days by the 
daring riders of the "Pony Express." 



520 AMERICA IN 1860 

Population had continued to increase at about the old 
rate of 100 per cent in twenty -five years, besides the added 
Population volume of immigration in the fifties. Between 
and the 1850 and 1860 our numbers had risen from 
sections twenty -three million to thirty-one and a half; 
and the cities (eight thousand people and upwards) counted 
now 158. This was four times as many as twenty years 
earlier ; and the cities now contained one man in every six 
of the entire population, instead of one in twelve, as in 
1840, or one in twenty, as in 1800. 

The cities of 1860 were still large towns gone to seed from 
rapid growth. They were unplanned, ugly, filthy, poorly 
policed ; and the larger ones were run by corrupt 
"rings" of politicians, who maintained their 
power by unblushing fraud. New York introduced a uni- 
formed and disciplined "Metropolitan police" just before 
the War ; and the invention of the steam fire engine, in 
1853, promised somewhat better protection against the 
common devastating fires. 

The North contained nineteen million of the thirty-one 
and a half million people of the Union, a ratio of 19 to 12 ; 
strength ^^^ ^^ ^^^ twclvc and a half million in the 
of North South, four million were slaves. Moreover, when 
an out ^j^^ ^^^ jj^^ ^^g finally drawn, four slave-holding 
States (Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, and Missouri) re- 
mained with the North. These States contained a fourth 
of the "Southern" population; and the recruits which 
these divided districts sent to the South were about offset 
by recruits to the North from "West" Virginia and Eastern 
Tennessee. Thus, for totals, secession was to be supported 
by less than five and a half million Whites (with three and 
a half million slaves) against more than twenty-two million 
for the Union. The area of Secession contained one White 
man of military age to four in the North. The North had 
three fourths the railway mileage and six sevenths of the 
cities of the Union. 

The South too ivas less able to feed and clothe armies. She 
furnished seven eighths of the world's raw cotton ; but she 



NORTH AND SOUTH 521 

did not raise her own full supply of food, and manufactures 
were almost totally lacking. Minerals and water power 
were abundant, but unused. Said a Charleston paper to 
its people: "Whence come your axes, hoes, scythes.^ Yes, 
even your plows, harrows, rakes, ax and auger handles? 
Your furniture, carpets, calicoes, and muslins ? The cradle 
that rocks your infant, the top your boy spins, the doll 
your girl caresses, the clothes your children wear, the books 
from which they are educated ... all are imported into 
South Carolina." "The North," says Rhodes, "combined 
the resources of farm, shop, and factory ; the South was but 
a farm" — and a farm which received from outside much 
of its bread and meat. 

Even so, only half as much of the land was cultivated 
South as North. The value of Southern farm land, too, was 
less than that of similar land in the North, while the value 
of farm machinery to each cultivated acre was not half that 
in the North. Slaves could not be trusted with machinery. 

That the difference was due not to climate, but to labor, 
is clear from the fact that it showed instantly upon crossing 
a State line. In 1796 George Washington noted the higher 
prices of land in Pennsylvania than in Maryland "though 
not of superior quality"; and added his opinion, on that 
ground, that Virginia must follow Pennsylvania's example 
of emancipation "at a period not far remote." Tocqueville 
noted the contrast between the north and south banks of the 
Ohio: thinly scattered population, with occasional gangs 
of indolent slaves in the few, " half -desert " fields, as over 
against "the busy hum of industry . . . fields rich with 
harvest . . . comfortable homes . . . prosperity on all 
sides." In 1859 Frederick Law Olmsted made a journey 
through the Southern States ; and his acute observations 
(summed up in his Cotton Kingdom) show that the indus- 
trial retardation of the South had been steadily increasing 
up to the final catastrophe. 

In other respects, also, slavery was avenged upon the 
masters. The poorer Whites were degraded by it, and the 



522 AMERICA IN 1860 

slave-owning class were unduly passionate, imperious, and 
willful. 

The 9,000,000 Whites of the slaveholding States composed 
some 1,800,000 families. One fifth of these owned slaves; 
The South- ^^^ only eight or ten thousand families owned 
ern aris- more than fifty apiece. This small aristocracy 
tocracy j^^^ ^ peculiar charm — if only the ugly substruc- 

ture could be forgotten. The men were leisured and culti- 
vated, with a natural gift for leadership and a high sense of 
public duty. They were courageous, honorable, generous, 
with easy bearing and a chivalrous courtesy. Visitors from 
the Old World complained that Northern men were ab- 
sorbed in business cares and lacking in ease of manner ; 
but they were always charmed by the aristocratic manners 
and cultivated taste of the gentry of the South. 

It must be added, however, not only that the great body 
of small slave-owners were destitute of this charm, but that 
they were often uneducated. The South produced little 
literature of a high order (except political speeches) and 
little art ; and it had few schools. On the other hand, 
Southern politics had absolutely no taint of that corruption 
which had appeared in the North. 

Man for man, in marching and fighting, the Southerner 
was far more than a match for the man of the North, — 
especially for the man of the Eastern cities. Southern 
outdoor life and familiarity with firearms counted for much 
in the early campaigns of the war. The North had been 
sadly deficient in athletics and in wholesome living, and 
was at its lowest ebb in physical condition. (Emerson 
ate " pie " for breakfast regularly !) The agricultural 
population of the West, however, resembled the South in 
physical characteristics ; and the men of the North, city or 
country, had a mechanical ability, useful in repairing or 
building bridges or engines, which was less apparent in the 
armies of the South. 



THE POLITICAL STRUGGLE 523 

THE LAST POLITICAL STRUGGLE FOR SUPREMACY 

In April, 1860, the Democratic National Convention met 
at Charleston, amid tense excitement over the whole 
country. Douglas men had a majority, but not 
the necessary two thirds. The Southern extrem- craticCon- 
ists insisted on a platform affirming the duty of ^f jggo^ 
Congress to defend slavery in all Territories and 
condemning Douglas' doctrine of possible "unfriendly legis- 
lation" as unconstitutional. The Douglas men voted this 
down. Then the Southern delegates withdrew. After ten 
days of fruitless negotiation with that seceding faction, the 
Convention adjourned, to meet at Baltimore in June. 
There the Moderates nominated Douglas. The seceders 
then placed in nomination John C. Breckinridge of Ken- 
tucky upon their extreme platform. 

Meantime, conservative representatives of the old Whig 
and Know-nothing parties organized as the Constitutional 
Union party ; and their Convention (May 9) nom- The " Union 
inated John Bell of Tennessee, announcing the p"*^ 
compromise platform, "No constitutional principles except 
the Constitution of the country, the Union of the States, and 
the enforcement of the laws." This party received support 
from the great moneyed interests of the North and from 
many of the large planters of the South. 

A week later, the Republican Convention met at Chicago 
in a vast "wigwam," amid wild enthusiasm from Republicans 
thousands of spectators. At first Seward was the nominate 
leading candidate ; but he had many personal *°*^° ° 
enemies, and the third ballot nominated Abraham Lincoln. 

Most New England Republicans were deeply grieved. 
They believed that, in passing by Seward, principle had 
been sacrificed to a mistaken idea of expediency ; and they 
looked upon Lincoln as not only obscure, but ignorant, 
uncouth, and incapable. Most of his support, indeed, 
came from men who regarded him as "available" rather 
than particularly desirable. Almost no one of prominence 
yet dreamed of the wise, patient, steadfast, far-seeing 



524 AMERICA IN 1860 

man, of homely grandeur, that the next years were to 
reveal. 

With the Democratic party hopelessly divided. Repub- 
lican victory in the electoral college was almost certain. To the 
South, that prospect was alarming. The Republican plat- 
form had once more reasserted that Congress had no power 
to interfere with slavery in the States ; but in the 1858 debate 
with Douglas, Lincoln had said boldly and sagaciously : 
*"A house divided against itself cannot stand.' I believe 
this government cannot endure permanently half slave and 
half free. I do not expect the house to fall ; but I expect 
it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or 
all the other." The South saw that this speech was the 
real platform, — to which the Republican party would 
have to come. Republican success ivould mean eventually 
a reversal of the Supreme Court and continued progress 
toward Lincoln's "nation all free," if the nation held 
together at all. 

The South did not shrink. Deliberately, in advance, it 
made preparations to break up the Union and save slavery. 
. North and South no longer understood each other, 

divided In the Seventy years since the adoption of the 
against Constitution, the North had moved steadily toward 

new intellectual and moral standards and a new 
system of industry : the South had remained stagnant. As 
a Southern writer said : "The whirl and rush of progress en- 
compassed the South on every side. . . . Yet alone in all 
the world she stood unmoved by it." The North had 
adopted the new Websterian views of the Constitution, in 
accord with modern needs : the South clung to the old, out- 
grown views expressed by Calhoun. The great Protestant 
denominations — Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians — had 
already split apart into distinct churches. North and South, 
on the slavery issue. Southern associations were forming, 
pledged to import manufactures from England rather than 
from the North. The North condemned the South as a 
community built upon a great sin : the South despised and 
reviled the North as a race of "mudsills" and cheats, and 



A HOUSE DIVIDED 525 

boasted Its own higher sense of honesty and honor. Unity 
was already gone in hearts, in industry, in rehgious organ- 
izations. It was going in commercial intercourse. It could 
not long endure, on such terms, in government. 

Lincoln carried every Northern State (including Cali- 
fornia) except for three of the seven New Jersey electors. 
Douglas received only those three votes and the Lincoln's 
nine from Missouri, though his popular vote was election 
nearly as large as Lincoln's. Bell carried the moderate 
Border States, Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. All the 
other Southern States went to Breckinridge. Lincoln had 
180 electoral votes to 123 for his three competitors com- 
bined ; but in the popular vote, he had only 1,857,610 out 
of a total of 4,645,380. The victory was narrow ; and it 
was the victory of a divided section over a weaker but 
more united section. 



PAET X — NATIONALISM VIOTOEIOUS, 1860-1876 
CHAPTER XXXIII 

THE CALL TO ARMS 

November 10, four days after Lincoln's election, the 
legislature of South Carolina appropriated money for arms, 
Secession ^^^ Called a State convention to act on the question 
of seven of secession. All over the State, Palmetto ban- 
ners unfurled and "liberty poles" rose. Decem- 
ber 17, the convention met. Three days later, it unani- 
mously "repealed" the ratification of the Federal Constitu- 
tion by the State convention of 1788, and declared that 
"the State of South Carolina has resumed her place among 
the nations of the world." By February 1, like action had 
been taken in Georgia and the five Gulf States — the entire 
southern tier of States. 

Northern writers long charged that the Southern leaders 
carried secession as a "conspiracy," and that they were 
A popular afraid to refer the matter to a direct vote. This is 
movement absolutely wrong. Public opinion forced Jeffer- 
son Davis onward faster than he liked ; and the mass of 
small farmers were more ardent than the aristocracy — 
whose large property interests tended, perhaps, to keep 
them conservative. For more than a year, in the less aristo- 
cratic counties, popular conventions, local meetings, and 
newspapers had been threatening secession if a President 
unfriendly to the Dred Scott decision should be elected ; 
and when even the "Fire-eater" Toombs paused at the last 
moment to contemplate compromise, his constituents 
talked indignantly of presenting him with a tin sword. 
The South was vastly more united in 1861 than the colonies 
were in 1776. The leaders acted through conventions, not 

526 



THE SOUTHERN CONFEDERACY 527 

because they feared a popular vote, but because their politi- 
cal methods had remained unchanged for seventy years and 
because they thought it seemly for their States to secede 
by the same machinery by which they had originally 
" acceded " to the Union. 

Few Southerners questioned the right of a "sovereign 
State" to secede. The sole difference of opinion was whether 
suflBcient provocation existed to make such action Doctrine of 
wise. When a State convention had voted for the " right " 

ii • " TT • " J- of secession 

secession, even the previous Union men went 
with their State, conscientiously and enthusiastically. Thus, 
Alexander H. Stephens made a desperate struggle in Geor- 
gia for the Union, both in the State campaign and in the 
convention ; but when the convention decided against him 
208 to 69,^ he cast himself devotedly into secession. He 
would have thought any other course treason. Allegiance, 
the South felt, was due primarily to one's State. 

To understand the splendid devotion of the South to a 
hopeless cause during the bloody years that followed, we 
must understand this viewpoint. The South fought "to 
keep the past upon its throne" ; but it believed, with every 
drop of its blood, that it was fighting for the sacred right 
of self-government, against "conquest" by tyrannical "in- 
vaders." 

February 4, a convention of delegates from the seven 
seceding States met to form a new union — "the Confederate 
States of America." The constitution was mod- xheSouth- 
eled upon that of the old Union, with some new em Con- 
emphasis on State sovereignty. Jefferson Davis ^ ^^^'^^ 
was soon chosen President of the Confederacy, and Alex- 
ander H. Stephens Vice President. 

The Confederacy did not believe the North would use 
force against secession. Still it made vigorous preparation 
for possible war. As each State seceded, its citizens in 

^ The real test vote had come a little earlier — 165 to 130. This was the strong- 
est Union vote in the Lower South. In Mississippi, the test stood 84 to 15; in 
Florida, 62 to 7 ; in Alabama, 61 to 39 ; in Louisiana, 113 to 17. In Texas the ques- 
tion was referred to the people, and in spite of a vigorous Union campaign by Governor 
Sam Houston they voted three to one for secession. 



528 THE CIVIL WAR. 1861-1862 

Congress and in the service of the United States resigned 
their oflBces. The small army and navy of the Union was 
And the in this way completely demoralized, — losing nearly 
Union jjg^jf [^^ officers. Each seceding State, too, seized 

promptly upon the Federal forts and arsenals within its 
limits, — sending commissioners to Washington to arrange 
for money compensation. In the seven seceded States, the 
Federal government retained only Fort Sumter in Charles- 
ton harbor and three forts on the Gulf. Federal courts 
ceased to be held in the seceded States, because of the 
resignation of judges and other officials and the absolute 
impossibility of securing jurors. Federal tariffs were no 
longer collected. Only the post office remained as a symbol 
of the old Union. 

President Buchanan, in his message to Congress in De- 
cember, declared that the Constitution gave no State the 
Buchanan's right to seccdc, but — a curious paradox — that it 
message gave the government no right "to coerce a sov- 
ereign State" if it did secede. For the remaining critical 
three months of his term he let secession gather head as it 
liked. With homely wit, Seward wrote to his wife that the 
Message shows " conclusively that it is the President's duty 
to execute the laws — unless some one opposes him ; and 
that no State has a right to go out of the Union — unless 
it wants to." 

This flabby policy, moreover, was much like the attitude 
of the masses of the North during those same months. 
Hesitation Evcu from Republican leaders resounded the cry, 
at the North " L^t {\iq erring sisters go in peace." In October, 
General Scott, Commander of the army, suggested to the 
President a division of the country into four confederacies, 
— for which he outlined hoiuidaries . Northern papers de- 
clared "coercion" both wrong and impossible. Horace 
Greeley's New York Tribune, for years the greatest anti- 
slavery organ and the chief molder of Republican opinion, 
expressed these views repeatedly: "We hope never to live 
in a republic, whereof one section is pinned to another by 
bayonets " (November 9) ; " Five millions of people . . . can 



HESITATION AT THE NORTH 529 

never be subdued while fighting around their own hearth- 
stones" (November 30); "The South has as good a right 
to secede from the Union as the colonies had to secede 
from Great Britain" (December 17) ; "If the Cotton States 
wish to form an independent nation, they have a clear moral 
right to do so" (February 23, 1861). Even Lowell thought 
the South "not worth conquering back." And Wendell 
Phillips asserted (April 9), "Abraham Lincoln has no right 
to a soldier in Fort Sumter." 

The Border States urged one more try at compromise, 
Virginia called a Peace Convention which was well attended 
and which sat at Washington through February. Attempts 
This body, and many Republican leaders, pro- atcompro- 
posed various amendments to the Constitution to ""^"^ 
fortify slavery and so conciliate the South : especially to 
provide Federal compensation for escaped slaves, and to 
divide the National domain, present and future, between 
slavery and freedom, along the line of the old Missouri 
Compromise. But the only outcome of this compromise 
agitation was the hasty submission to the country of an 
amendment prohibiting Congress from ever interfering with 
slavery in the States. As Lincoln said, this merely made 
express what was already clearly implied in the Constitu- 
tion, and it was wholly inadequate to satisfy the South. 
It passed Congress with a solid Republican vote, however, 
and was ratified by three Northern States before war 
stopped the process. 

Lincoln's inaugural, on March 4, was a win- Lincoln's 
ning answer to Southern claims and a firm decla- inaugural 
ration of policy. 

[As to the reason for secession] : "Apprehension seems to exist 
among the people of the Southern States that . . . their property 
and their peace and personal security are to be endangered. 
There has never been any reasonable cause for such apprehension. 
... / have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere iinth the 
institution of slavery in the States ivhere it exists." 

[After demolishing the constitutional "right" of secession]: "I 
therefore consider that, in view of the Constitution and the laws 



530 THE CIVIL WAR, 1861-1862 

the Union is unbroken; and to the extent of my ability, I shall take 
care . . . that the laws of the Union shall be faithfully executed 
in all the States. ... In doing this there need he no bloodshed . . . 
unless it is forced upon the National authority. . . . The power 
confided to me will be used to hold . . . the property and places 
belonging to the government, and to collect the duties and imposts ; 
but beyond what may be necessary for these objects there will 
be no invasion, no using of force against the people anywhere." 

[ Then, recognizing the right of revolution, the deplorable loss jrom 
any division of the Union is set forth]: "Physically speaking, we 
cannot separate : we cannot remove our respective sections from 
each other, nor build an impassable wall between them. . . . 
Intercourse, either amicable or hostile, must continue between 
them. Is it possible, then, to make that intercourse more advan- 
tageous or more satisfactory after separation than before? Can 
aliens make treaties easier than friends can make laws. 5* 

"In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in 
mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. . . . You have no 
oath registered in heaven to destroy the government, while I 
shall have the most solemn one to 'preserve, protect, and de- 
fend' it." 

Statesmen showered the new President with advice. 
Lincoln heard all patiently ; but his real efforts were given 
Abraham to keeping in touch, not with "leaders," but with 
Lincoln ^j^g plain people whom he so well understood. 
His own eyes were set unwavering upon his goal — the 
preservation of the Union — while with unrivaled skill, he 
kept his finger on the Nation's pulse, to know how fast he 
might move toward that end. For a time he was railed at 
by noisy extremists, who would have had him faster or 
slower ; but the silent masses responded to his sympathy 
and answered his appeal with love and perfect trust, and 
enabled him to carry through successfully the greatest task 
so far set for any American statesman.^ 

' The country now paid heavily, through the wear upon its burdened chieftain, 
for its low tone toward the spoils system. Washington was thronged, beyond all 
precedent, with office seekers, who were "Republicans for revenue"; and the 
first precious weeks of the new administration had to go largely to settling petty 
personal disputes over plunder. Lincoln compared himself to a man busied in 
assigning rooms in a palace to importunate applicants, while the structure itself was 



THE CALL TO ARMS 531 

Despite the seeming cowardice or apathy of Northern 
statesmen, the masses needed only a blow and a leader to 
rally them for the Union. South Carolina fired 
on the flag, and Abraham Lincoln called the 
North to arms. From November to April, Major Ander- 
son and sixty soldiers had held Fort Sumter in Charleston 
harbor. In vain he had pleaded to Buchanan for reinforce- 
ments. In January, Buchanan made a feeble show of send- 
ing some ; but the nn armed vessel, weakly chosen for the 
purpose, was easily turned back by Secessionist shells ; and 
further efforts were soon made difficult by rising batteries 
— whose construction Anderson's orders did not permit 
him to prevent. 

A month after taking office, Lincoln decided, against all his 
Cabinet, to send supplies to Anderson. The Confederates 
took this decision as a declaration of war, and attacked 
the fort. April 12, the bombardment of Sumter began; 
and thirty hours later, with the fortress in ruins. Major 
Anderson surrendered. The next day (April 15) the wires 
flashed over the country Lincoln's stirring call for seventy- 
five thousand volunteers. 

This call to arms brought a magnificent uprising of the 
North. Laborers, mechanics, business men, professional 
men, college boys and their learned teachers. And the 
shouldered muskets side by side. From Maine to ^^^ *° ^^^^ 
California, devotion and love for the Union spoke with one 
mighty voice. Banks offered huge loans without security, 
and wealthy men placed their private fortunes at the dis- 
posal of the government. By July, 310,000 men were in 
the field. Before the close of 1861, the number was 660,000, 
enlisted for "three years or the war." Party distinctions in 
the North faded. Talk of compromise was drowned in the 
din of arms. Douglas, dying though he was, hastened 
gallantly to Lincoln's support ; and Buchanan gave cordial 
aid. Lowell wrote of "that first gun at Sumter which 

burning over his head; and in 1862, when an old Illinois friend remarked on his 
careworn face, he exclaimed with petulant humor, — "It isn't this war that's kill- 
ing me. Judge : it's your confounded Pepperton postoffice !" 



532 



THE CIVIL WAR, 1861-1862 



brought the free States to their feet as one man"; and 
four years later, while sorrowing, for his own glorious dead, 
he told again how 

"America lay asleep, like the princess of the fairy tale, enchanted 
by prosperity. But at the fiery kiss of war, the spell is broken, the 
blood tingles along her veins, and she awakens, conscious of her beauty 
and her sovereignty. . . . What splendid possibilities has not our 
trial revealed, even to ourselves! What costly stuff whereof to make 
a Nation I" 




Union and Confederacy in 1862. 

The Confederacy sprang to arms with even greater 
unanimity. And now the remaining Slave States had to 

choose sides. Within six weeks the second tier 
tier of Slave (North Carolina and Virginia, Tennessee, Arkan- 
secede ^^^^ joined the Confederacy rather than join in 

attem.pts "to coerce sister States";^ and the 
Confederate capital was moved from Montgomery to Rich- 
mond, within striking distance of Washington. 

^ The people of the western counties in Virginia had been opposed to secession. 
When the State withdrew, they organized a separate State government, and (1863) 
were admitted to the Union as West Virginia. The legislature of Tennessee sub- 
mitted the matter directly to the people; and the popular vote stood 105,000 to 
47,000 (the eastern mountain counties, like their Virginia neighbors, containing a 
strong Union element). In Virginia the convention vote was two to one for 



THE CALL TO ARMS 533 

The third tier of Slave States (Maryland and Delaware, 
Kentucky, Missouri) were the true ""Border States." 
Delaware was firm for the Union from the first; The Border 
and in spite of strong secession sentiment, the states 
others were finally kept in the Union by Lincoln's wise 
diplomacy and by swift action of Union armies, — though 
their inhabitants sent many regiments to swell the South- 
ern ranks. Missouri would have joined the Confederacy 
except for vigorous measures by the many thousands of 
recent, freedom-loving German immigrants in St. Louis, 
who stood stoutly for the Union. The lines were drawn, 
twenty -two States against eleven. 

secession. There also the question was submitted to a popular vote; and the 
people sustained the convention by a vote of three to one — the opposition coming 
almost wholly from the western counties. A Virginian who had been a Unionist 
delegate in the convention was asked just afterwards — "What will the Union men 
of Virginia do ? " ' " There are no Union men left in Virginia," came the swift reply. 
" We stand this day a united people. . . . We will give you a fight that will stand 
out on the page of history." 



CHAPTER XXXIV 

THE CIVIL WAR 

At first the North expected confidently to end the con- 
flict in three months — "by one decisive blow." From this 
^ „ ,, dream the country awoke when the Union forces 

Bull Run "^ , T> 77 r» /T 1 \ • 

were utterly routed at BuU nun (July 21) in an 
advance on Richmond. Then, in more wholesome temper, 
it settled down to a stern war. That war lasted four years, 
and was the most tremendous struggle the world had ever 
seen. 

To subdue the South two things were essential : (1) The 
seceding States must be invaded and conquered on their 
own soil ; but this was plainly impossible unless (2) a 
cordon was first drawn about them, so that they could get 
no supplies from the outside world. 

To completely beleaguer the South, then, was the first 
task. On the land side, the overwhelming numbers of the 
Plans of North made this fairly easy. The Border States 
campaigns were quickly occupied, and the South was kept 
upon the defensive. She did make some daring raids into 
Kentucky and two formidable invasions across the Potomac 
that threw the North Atlantic cities into panic ; but all 
these sorties were failures. The first one across the Poto- 
mac was turned back at Antietam, September 17, 1862 ; and 
the second, the "high-tide of the Confederacy," at Gettys- 
burg, July 1-3, 1863. 

To close the three thousand miles of sea coast was a more 
difficult matter. April 19, 1861, Lincoln declared it block- 
The aded ; but this was little more than a statement 

blockade q{ intention. Only twelve ships were at the gov- 
ernment's command. The rest of the small navy of forty- 
nine ships had fallen into Southern hands or was scattered 

534 



y 



THE ARBITRAMENT OF ARMS 535 

far in foreign ports. But blockading squadrons were hur- 
riedly bought, built, and adapted out of coasting steamers 
and ferryboats ; and in a few months the paper blockade 
became real. From that time to the end, the throttling 
grip on Southern commerce clung closer and closer. 

The export crops, cotton and tobacco, were robbed of 
value. In 1860 the cotton export amounted to nearly two 
hundred millions of dollars ; in 1862, to four millions. As 
arms, railway material, clothing, wore out, it was almost 
impossible to replenish the supply. Before the end of the 
first year, there was an alarming scarcity of salt, butter, 
coffee, candles, and medicines. By recourse to homespun, 
and by raising corn instead of cotton, part of the need was 
met. Part was beyond remedy. 

Southern sympathizers and venturesome capitalists made 
it a business to build swift "blockade runners" to carry 
supplies to Confederate ports from the Bermudas, and to 
bring out the cotton piled up at Southern wharves and worth 
fabulous prices in the idle European factories. Fifteen 
hundred such vessels were captured during the war ; and, 
before the close, they had nearly vanished from the seas. 
While trips could be made at all, profits were enormous. A 
ton of salt, costing $7.50 outside the Confederacy, could be 
sold inside in gold for a profit of 20,000 per cent. 

For one moment it looked as if the Union fleets would 
be swept from the seas, and the blockade raised. When the 
government troops abandoned Norfolk navy yard ^j^^ 
(on the secession of Virginia) , they left there. Monitor 
only partially destroyed, the frigate Merrimac. *° "g^nm 
The Confederates built on her hull an iron roofing, and sent 
her forth as the Virginia against the wooden frigates of the 
United States in Hampton Roads. This first armored ram 
on the American coast sank two towering ships (March 8, 
1862), and steamed back to her anchorage, confident of 
completing her mission on the morrow. But, during that 
night, arrived at the Roads another type of iron vessel, the 
Monitor, with low, flat deck surmounted by a revolving tur- 
ret mounting two huge guns, — a "cheese box on a raft." 



536 



THE CIVIL WAR, 1861-1865 



After a sharp engagement, the Virginia was driven to seek 
shelter. The blockade was saved, — and the knell had 
sounded for wooden men-of-war. Vessels had been covered 
with iron plates in some of the earlier campaigns on the 
Mississippi, and England and France had constructed some 
ironclads ; but it was the spectacular battle of "the Monitor 
and Merrimac " which demonstrated to the world the arrival 
of a new order. 

Invasion of the Confederacy had been simplified tremen- 
dously by the saving of the Border States to the Union. 
Lines for There were three primary lines of attack. The 
Union Army of the Potomac, with headquarters about 

invasion Washington, must try to capture Richmond, the 
political center of the Confederacy, and crush the army of 




GULF OF 



Scene of the Civil War. 



defense — the Army of Northern Virginia. In the West, 
the Unionists must secure the Tennessee and Cumberland 
rivers, so as to occupy Tennessee and to open roads into 
Mississippi and Alabama. And the course of the Missis- 



IN THE FIELD 



537 



sippi had to be secured by the capture of such Confederate 
strongholds as New Madrid, Island No. 10, Port Hudson, 
Memphis, and New Orleans. {Secondary lines of invasion 
were pointed out by the location of the more important 
railways — especially those from west to east, such as the 
Memphis and Charleston Road. To secure these roads, 
engagements were fought in 1862 at Corinth, Pittsburg 
Landing, Shiloh, and Memphis.) 

Vicksburg, the last of the river fortresses to hold out, was 
forced to surrender to General Grant on July 3, 1863 (the 
final day of Gettysburg) ; so that the Father of opening of 
Waters "once more rolled un vexed to the sea," the Mis- 
cutting off Arkansas, Texas, and most of Louisiana ^*^^^pp* 
from the main body of the Confederacy. The second task 




^^3 Union States 
B^^The Confetleracy 
I I Territoriea 



Union and Confederacy after Gettysburg. 

had begun earlier, but lasted longer. Grant had captured 
Forts Donelson and Henry, commanding the lower courses 
of the Tennessee rivers, in 1862 ; but Union occupation of 
Tennessee, and indeed of the line of the Ohio, was not 
assured, until, after oscillating campaigns and some of the 
most bloody fighting of the war. Grant, Thomas, and Sher- 
man drove the Confederates from Chattanooga, in November 
of 1863. 



538 



THE CIVIL WAR, 1861-1865 




IN THE FIELD 539 

This decisive victory opened up a fourth line of invasion, 
to Atlanta, at the farther end of the Atlanta and Chatta- 
nooga Railway, — only 135 miles distant, but with Shermans 
an intervening region of rugged mountains. At- March to 
lanta was located in the iron and coal region of * ® ^* 
northern Georgia and was becoming a center for manufac- 
turing arms and railway material. As the only such center 
in the Confederacy, its capture was of supreme importance. 
This became Sherman's task in the summer of '64 in a four 
months' campaign, against the skillful opposition of the out- 
numbered Johnston and the pounding of his desperate suc- 
cessor. Hood. 

Atlanta was taken September 3. Leaving its factories 
in ashes, and detaching Thomas with sufficient force to 
engage Hood, Sherman then (November) struck out a 
fifth line of invasion, through the heart of the Confederacy 
for Savannah, — living on the country and finding not even a 
militia to oppose him. 

Meantime, in the East, the genius of Lee ^ and the splendid 
fighting qualities of his devoted but diminishing army, 
aided, too, by geographical conditions, — trackless Lees mag- 
swamps and broad streams subject to sudden nificent de- 
floods, — held the Union forces at bay year after 
year, until Grant was brought from the West and given men 
in ever fresh multitudes to wear down his opponents. Even 
then, Lee's thinned and starving veterans remained un- 
conquered, until the empty shell of the Confed- collapse of 
eracy had been pierced from circumference to the Con- 
circumference, and its absolute exhaustion bared ® ^^^^^ 
to the world by Sherman's devastating "March to the 
Sea." The South did not yield; it was pulverized. 

* Robert E. Lee ranks among the noblest Bgures in American history. He 
loved the Union deeply; but when Virginia seceded, he declined an offer of the 
command of the Union armies, and gave his sword to the Confederacy. The recent 
acceptance by Congress of his statue, to stand in Statuary Hall in the Capitol be- 
side Virginia's other great son, Washington, fitly denotes the reunion of North and 
South as one people. It is pleasant to record that, even at the surrender, when 
Lee rode into captured Richmond the Northern soldiers there gave him an ovation 
such as they seldom gave their own generals. 



540 THE CIVIL WAR, 1861-1865 

In the North one man out of two bore arms at some period 
of the war ; and one man out of three served three years. 
In the south nine men out of ten bore arms, and 
eight out of ten served three years. The total en- 
Hstments in the North counted 2,900,000 ; in the South, 
1,400,000. The three-year average for the North was 
1,557,000; for the South, 1,082,000. With far less effort 
than the South, the North kept a half more men in the field. 

But this does not take account of the slaves who served as 
teamsters, laborers on fortifications, cooks, and servants, in 
Southern armies, doing work that had to be performed by 
enlisted men on the other side.^ The Southern forces, too, 
were able to concentrate more rapidly, because they moved 
on the inside lines and knew the roads better. Perhaps, 
too, they were handled with greater skill. The North, 
after costly experimenting, found some excellent command- 
ers, Hancock, Hooker, Sherman, Sheridan, Grant; but the 
South had ready a larger proportion of its noblest sons with 
the best West Point training and with military experience. 
Indeed the South was better suited, by its whole spirit to 
develop military genius ; and all America to-day glories in 
the splendid chivalry and magnificent generalship of a 
score of Confederate leaders, among whom — only a little 
brighter than the rest — shine the names of "Stonewall" 
Jackson, Gordon, Longstreet, the two Johnstons, "Jeb" 
Stuart, and Lee. 

On the whole, until the final year, the armies in actual 
conflict did not often vary greatly in numbers. Then, 
indeed, the exhausted South could no longer make good 
her losses in battle — though her stern recruiting system 
did "rob the cradle and the grave." Her ranks shrank 
daily, while the Northern armies grew larger than ever. 
At the opening of that last terrible year of slaughter, from 
May 5 to June 12 (1864), — or from the Wilderness to 
Petersburg, — Grant hurled his 120,000 veterans almost 

* On tlie plantations, too, under the management of women, slaves raised the 
food crops for the South. Wonderful to say, there was no hint of a slave-rising 
during the war, and, until 1863, very little increase of runaways. 



FORCES, NORTH AND SOUTH 



541 




Lee and Jackson. The name " Stoiiewull " \va.> tiiven Jackson at Bull Run, 
where his brigade withstood what at first seemed an overwhelming Union onset. 
Like Cromwell's Ironsides, Jackson was wont to kneel in prayer before a charge- 
He was called Lee's right hand. 



542 THE CIVIL WAR, 1861-1865 

daily at Lee's 70,000, sufiFering a loss of 60,000 to Lee's 
14,000. New recruits were always ready to step into the 
gaps in the Union regiments ; while the Confederate ranks 
could only close up grimly. In the remaining campaigns, 
the Union forces usually outnumbered their opponents at 
least two to one. To add to the disparity. Grant sternly 
refused to exchange prisoners. 

Military prisons are always a sore subject. There is 
usually a tendency, in a long conflict, for their administra- 

. tion, on both sides, to fall to men less competent 

and less chivalrous than those who seek service at 
the front. Even in the early years of the war, there had been 
terrible misery in the prisons at the South — where medicines 
and supplies were wanting even for the Confederate soldiers. 
With less excuse, there had been cruel suffering also in North- 
ern prison camps. Toward the close, when the South was 
unable to feed her soldiers at the front, or to spare adequate 
forces for guards, conditions became horrible in the Southern 
prisons, — especially after Grant's refusal to exchange pris- 
oners packed the already crowded Libby and Anderson- 
ville with Union soldiers. On this whole topic the student 
will do well to consult Rhodes' exhaustive and impartial 
treatment {History, V, 483-515), and especially to note his 
conclusion : "All things considered, the statistics [of deaths] 
show no reason why the North should reproach the South." 

In 1863 there was a falling off of enlistment in the North, 
and Congress authorized a ''draft," — a conscription by lot 
from able-bodied males between the ages of twenty 
and forty. In enforcing this law, some oflBcials 
seem to have discriminated against Democratic districts ; and 
violent anti-draft riots broke out in several Eastern cities. 
These were put down sternly by the military ; but not till 
New York had been three days in the hands of a murderous 
*' nigger-hunting" mob, and only after a sacrifice of a thou- 
sand lives. 

Altogether the draft furnished less than forty thousand 
troops. Its real work lay in influencing State legislatures to 



FINANCES 543 

stimulate enlistment by generous bounties. Such moneys 
furnished support for dependent mothers and for children, 
and so enabled many a man to volunteer who otherwise 
must have worked at home. But it remains absolutely 
true, as Lowell said, that "the bounty which drew our best 
soldiers to the ranks was an idea.'' For the South, this 
was even more true, mistaken though the idea was ; but 
even the South had recourse to conscription, extending it 
to boys of seventeen and men of fifty. In most districts, 
however, volunteer enlistment had left small gleanings for 
this desperate law. 

The Buchanan administration had left the treasury empty, 
a debt mounting, and credit dubious ; but Salmon P. Chase, 
Lincoln's Secretary of the Treasury, was supported 
loyally by Congress in a course of vigorous war 
finance. Year by year, bonds were sold at home or abroad 
in amounts which at any earlier time would have seemed 
fabulous. A direct tax of $20,000,000 was apportioned 
among the States. An income tax of 3 per cent on all in- 
comes over $800 was imposed; and in 1864 this was raised 
to 4 per cent (but on the largest surpluses the rates rose 
only to 10 per cent !). Internal excises and stamp duties of 
the most varied and searching description reached almost all 
callings, products, and business transactions. Session by 
session Congress devised higher and higher "war-tariffs," 
rising to rates before unheard of, to remain without change 
twenty years after the war was over. And a series of "Legal 
Tender Acts" provided half a billion of dollars of paper 
money, based only on the faith of the government and 
amounting to a "forced loan." 

These "greenbacks" mentioned no specific date for re- 
demption, nor did the law provide any specific security, and 
of course the value fluctuated with success or fail- " oreen- 
ure in the field. Depreciation set in at once. Gold backs " 
was hoarded or sent abroad in trade ; and on one dark day in 
1864 it sold at 285, while most of the time after 1862 a dollar 
of paper was really worth only from fifty to seventy cents. 



544 THE CIVIL WAR, 1861-1865 

Prices rose, for this reason and for other causes connected 
with the war, to some 90 per cent above the old level. 
Wages rose, too ; but more slowly, and only two thirds 
as much, — so that the laboring classes bore the great 
part of the cost of the war. Workingmen endured much 
suffering, even while "business" was exceedingly "pros- 
perous." 

Toward the close of the war, taxation was bringing in half 
a billion a year ; but in 1863 the expenditure had risen to two 
Taxes and and a half millions a day — or two times the daily 
bonds income. Business could not well stand more taxes ; 

nor could more paper money be issued safely. The extra 
amount must be borrowed by selling new bonds. But how 
could the government induce capitalists to buy them in 
sufficient amounts ? Chase solved this problem in part by 
the National Banking Acts of 1863 and 1864 — the basis also 
of a system of banks and bank currency which, whatever 
its later faults, was far better than America had before 
known. Any association of five or more persons, with a 
capital of at least $100,000, was authorized (1) to organize 
a National bank, (2) purchase National bonds to the 
amount of one third the capital, (3) deposit the bonds in 
the National Treasury, and (4) issue "National bank notes" 
on that security. A supplementary Act placed a tax of 
10 per cent on notes issued by State banks. Hundreds of 
State banks then reorganized as National banks, and their 
new demand for bonds met the needs of the Treasury. 

Capital is notoriously timid, and business notoriously 
selfish. There were not wanting the customary shames of 
army contractors who swelled their fortunes by furnishing 
shoddy clothing, paper-soled shoes, and rotten food to the 
troops ; while other more adventurous pirates of finance 
made fabulous profits by illicit or treasonable trade with 
the South. But on the whole the moneyed men showed a 
noble patriotism. Andrew D. White tells a typical story 
(Autobiography, I, 89) of the roughly expressed idealism of 
a multimillionaire — still a rare phenomenon in the sixties 
— a man who had 



THE RUIN OF THE SOUTH 545 

"risen by hard work from simple beginnings to the iiead of an 
immense business ... a liard, determined, shrewd man of affairs, 
the hist man in the world to show anything like sentimentalism. 
. . . He said something advising investment in the newly created 
national debt. I answered, 'You are not, then, one of those who 
believe that our debt will be repudiated?' He rejoined: 'Re- 
pudiation or no repudiation, I am putting everything I can rake 
and scrape together into national bonds, to help this government 
maintain itself; for, by God, if I am not to have any country, I 
don't want any money.'" 

Northern statesmanship also devoted itself deliberately 
and effectively to encouraging the production of wealth — 
that there might be more to tax. The demand for Growth of 
war supplies and the high tariffs stimulated manu- wealth in 
factures enormously. Congress gave vast amounts 
of land and money to the Union Pacific to enable that com- 
pany to build a railway across the continent, and other rail- 
ways opened up great tracts of new territory to agriculture. 
In 1862 the Morrill Bill offered National land grants to State 
institutions providing scientific training in agriculture and 
in mechanical arts. The same year the long-delayed " Home- 
stead Bill" offered free 160 acres of land to any head of a 
family who would live upon and improve it. 

The South had little wealth to tax. It had no capitalists 
to buy its bonds ; and they could not long be sold abroad. 
Paper money was issued in floods by both central confed- 
and State governments, — and depreciated even erate 
faster than the famous "Continental currency" of ^^^^^^^ 
Revolutionary days, so that in 1864 it was not unusual for 
a Southern soldier to pay $200 for a poor pair of shoes. The 
Confederacy did not formally make this paper a legal tender ; 
but, before the end of the war, it was forced to seize supplies 
from the fields and barns, and it could pay for them only in 
this money — at rates fixed from month to month by govern- 
ment decree. Neither bonds nor currency were ever re- 
deemed. 

Thus the South lived upon itself. And the capital that 
could not be eaten, — that which was fixed in buildings and 



546 THE CIVIL WAR, 1861-1865 

roads, — was in large part burned or ruined by the Northern 
invaders. Southern wealth was gone before the survivors 
of her heroic men laid down their arms. The world had 
never seen another so vast and complete a devastation of a 
civilized land. 

The great Republic emerged from the battle-storm, glo- 
rious and whole, while the world stood amazed, convinced 
Devotion to against its will. The resources of the North were 
the Lost never lacking. They grew faster than they could 
Cause Y)Q spent ; and the North had more men, more tilled 

acres, more manufactures in 1865 than in 1861. But for the 
South, as Woodrow Wilson says so well, "the great struggle 
was maintained by sheer spirit and self-devotion, in spite of 
constantly diminishing resources and constantly waning 
hope. . . . And all for a belated principle in government, 
an outgrown economy, an impossible purpose. There is in 
history no devotion not religious, no constancy not meant for 
success, that can furnish a parallel to the devotion and con- 
stancy of the South in this extraordinary war." The Ameri- 
can of to-day sorrows at the terrible sacrifice the South made 
for mistaken ends ; but his heart swells with patriotic emo- 
tion at the heroic vision of that chivalrous devotion to the 
Lost Cause, — that gallant constancy, that peerless courage. 

When the war began, a large part of the North cared noth- 
ing about abolishing slavery, or was positively opposed to 
The war doing SO ; and the loyal Border States were kept in 
and slavery i\^q Union ouly by repeated assurances from the 
government that the war was not intended to free slaves. 
The day after Bull Run, by 107 to 2, the Republican House 
reassured the War Democrats and the Border States to this 
effect. In the opening weeks of the struggle, it is true, 
" Contra- General Butler, at Fortress Monroe, refused to de- 
bands " liver to an owner in the Confederate army a run- 
away slave who had escaped to the Union lines, — on the 
ground that the man was "contraband of war" (since he 
might be made useful to the enemy). This logic was so 
sound, and the phrase so caught the popular approval, 



J 



THE END OF SLAVERY 547 

that the government did not interfere with the Union 
generals who chose thereafter to free "contrabands" seek- 
ing refuge tvithin their lines. But when General Fre- 
mont, in Missouri, proclaimed free the slaves of all citizens 
of that State who were in arms for the Confederacy, the 
order was promptly disavowed by President Lincoln. For a 
year more, the majority of the Union generals were ir-clined 
to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act as to Negroes who sought 
refuge with the army, even when the owners were serving 
in the Confederate ranks. 

But it became more and more plain that, if the North was 
successful, the result nmst be freedom for the Negro; and, 
in March, 1862, Lincoln recommended to Congress that the 
States should be invited to decree gradual emancipation, 
and that, wherever this was done the United States should 
compensate the owners and colonize the freed Negroes. 

This wise plan was never adopted. In April Congress 
abolished slavery in the District of Columbia, it is tru-i (with an 
appropriation of $1,000,000 to compensate the 
owners) ; and, in June, it abolished slavery in thf. abolished 
Territories, without compensation. It also passed ''i ?'?*"*;*. 

, . . . T • 1 ? 1 p 1 o I 1 °^ Columbia 

resoiutions appro vmg Lincoln s plan tor the States. 
But the President's earnest appeals to the Union leaders of 
the Border to persuade their States to act promptly and 
secure compensation for their slaves before it was too late, 
fell upon deaf ears. They could not yet believe his proph- 
ecy that soon they would find "bonds better property than 
bondsmen"; and the opportunity passed. 

Congress adjourned for the season on July 17, 1862, 
Five days later, Lincoln read to his surprised Cabinet the 
draft of a proposed Emancivation Proclamation. ,. , , 

rrM • 7J7-I70 7 Lincoln s 

Inis was not to apply to the Border States, or to the Emancipa- 
Southern territory under Union control. The only tion Procia- 

■t A ' • 1 • 1 1 mation 

warrant m the Constitution tor such action by the 
President had to be found in his powers as Commander in 
Chief. The Proclamation, in form, was merely a war meas- 
ure, designed to weaken the enemy. 

At Seward's suggestion, liincoln put the matter aside, 



548 THE CIVIL WAR, 1861-1865 

to wait for some signal victory — of which there had 
been few for a long year — that the Proclamation might not 
seem the act of a despairing government. Two months 
later, Lee's retreat after Antietam (page 534) furnished the 
appearance of a victory ; and September 23 the great Proc- 
lamation was given to the world, — to go into operation on 
the first day of the coming year. The Proclamation made 
an era in history. At the moment, of course, it was a paper 
edict, and did not actually free a slave. But from that day 
the war became a iimr to free slaves; and, as Union armies 
slowly conquered their way into the South, thousands, and 
finally millions, did become free. 

True, cautious as Lincoln had been, it seemed for a time 
as though he had moved too swiftly for Northern opinion. 
The fall elections gave anti-war majorities in several of the 
largest Northern States, before strongly Republican. In 
Ohio the Democrats carried 14 congressional districts out 
of 19; in Indiana, 8 out of 11; in Illinois, 11 out of 14. 
Says Professor A. B. Hart {Salmon P. Chase, 270) : "No 
Republican majority could be secured out of the free States ; 
but a silent and drastic process was applied by the military 
in the loyal Border States, which caused them to furnish 
enough Republican members to make up the majority 
without which the war must have failed." By such dubious 
means, 21 Republican Representatives were secured from 
the 26 Congressional districts of Missouri, Kentucky, and 
Maryland. 

And after an interval of dismay the Nation rallied. 
Emancipation was accepted as a settled policy ; and, in 
State 1864, Lincoln was reelected triumphantly, carrying 

Emancipa- every loyal State except New Jersey, Delaware, and 
^°^ Kentucky. Before the close of the war, Maryland, 

Missouri, and West Virginia abolished slavery without com- 
pensation ; and "Reconstruction governments" (page 557) in 
Tennessee, Louisiana, and Virginia freed the slaves in those 
parts of the Confederacy to which the Proclamation had 
not applied. Then "the whole thing was wound up," in 
Lincoln's expressive phrase, — all informalities legalized, all 



I 



ENGLAND'S ATTITUDE 549 

possible gaps covered, and the institution itself forever 
forbidden, ^ — by the Thirteenth Amendment (ratified in 
December, 1865). It was this amendment which ^j^^ 
freed the remaining slaves in Kentucky and Thirteenth 

Delaware. Amendment 

After the Emancipation Proclamation, the government 
began to receive Negro regiments into the army. More 
than fifty thousand Black men were enrolled during the 
remaining months of the war ; and large numbers of 
others were now used as teamsters and for camp work 
which had formerly rested on Northern White soldiers. 
Emancipation, too, ended all chance of the Sotith getting 
European aid. 

Both North and South had counted upon English sym- 
pathy. The South hoped that England would break the 
blockade, to secure cotton, so as to give work to her idle fac- 
tories and her hundreds of thousands of starving operatives. 
The North felt that England must favor war England 
against slavery, — forgetting, perhaps, that for and the 
more than a year it vociferated that it was not war- ^^"^ 
ring upon slavery, and ignoring also the fact that the mount- 
ing tariff, closing the usual market to English manufactures, 
was a constant irritation. Richard Cobden wrote to Charles 
Sumner (December 5, 1861) : "You know how ignorant we 
are of your history, geography, etc. . . . There are two sub- 
jects upon which we are unanimous and fanatical . . . per- 
sonal freedom and free trade. In your case we see a mighty 
struggle, — on one side protectionists, on the other slave 
owners. The protectionists say they do not seek to put down 
slavery : the slave owners say they do want free trade. Need 
you wonder at the confusion. in John Bull's head.''" Punch 
put the same dilemma : — 

^ The Proclamation had not made slavery subsequently illegal. But the great 
Amendment runs — after the phrasing of the Northwest Ordinance. — "Neither 
slavery nor involuntary ser^^tude . . . shall exist within the United States or any 
place subject to their jurisdiction." The contrast between this actual Thirteenth 
Amendment and the proposed "Thirteenth Amendment" of 1861, to guarantee 
slavery forever against national interference (page 529), measures part of the value of 
the war. 



550 THE CIVIL WAR, 1861-1865 

" The South enslaves those fellow men 

Whom we all love so dearly : 
The North keeps commerce bound again, 

Which touches us more nearly. 
Thus a divided duty we 

Perceive in this hard inatter : 
Free trade or sable brother free ? 

O, won't we choose the latter?" 

When President Lincoln proclaimed a blockade of South- 
ern ports, France and England at once called the attention 
„ , of their citizens to that proclamation and ordered a 

Soutnern . i- i i tci n- >» 

" beiiiger- strict neutrality between the two belligerents, 
ency " This word incensed the North, which had been 

claiming that the Confederates were merely 
"rioters." The English and French acknowledgment of the 
belligerency of the South was perhaps made with unnecessary 
haste ; but it is now generally agreed that such action afforded 
no real cause for complaint. It granted to the Confederates 
certain rights for their privateers in English and French 
ports, which, as mere rioters or pirates, they would not have 
enjoyed ; but it was not at all a recognition of the Confederacy 
as an independent nation. 

There was real danger of this catastrophe — which would 
almost certainly have been fatal to the Union. After Bull 
Run, English society generally believed that the South could 
not be conquered, and was more and more inclined to look 
upon the contest as One between empire and self-government. 
"In any case, since the South must win in the end," said 
they, "the sooner the matter is ended the better, so that our 
cotton mills may turn their spindles again and the danger of 
social revolution from starving workmen here be removed." 
Moreover, now that it seemed safe, the governing aristocracy 
of that time ^ was glad to show sympathy for the corre- 
sponding aristocracy of the South. Said Gladstone — not 
yet fully out of his Tory period — "Jefferson Davis and 
other leaders . . . have made an army ; they are making a 
navy ; they have made ... a nation." Still, so far as any 

* This was before the Reform Bill of 1867, which first made England a democracy. 



ENGLAND'S ATTITUDE 551 

act of the English government is concerned, the North had 
no cause whatever for offense until November, 1861. 

Then came an incident which nearly led to war with 
England. The Confederacy appointed James Mason and 
John Slidell commissioners to England and France, ^j^^ Mason- 
to secure recognition and alliance. These gentle- siideii 
men ran the blockade to Havana, and there took *"" ®°* 
passage on the English steamship Trent. November 8, an 
overzealous captain of an American man-of-war overhauled 
the Trent and took the two commissioners from her decks. 

The North burst into applause, though Lincoln and a few 
other cool heads saw that the government was placed in the 
wrong by this violation of a right of neutral vessels for which 
America had so long been ready to fight. England, too, 
had always prided herself particularly on affording refuge 
to jiolitical offenders from other lands ; and there was now 
a burst of sincere indignation in that country. The govern- 
ment used the opportunity to go far in showing Southern 
sympathies. Troops were hurried off for Canada, and a 
peremptory demand was made for the surrender of the 
prisoners and for an apology — softened though the form of 
the note was, from the original draft, through the influence 
of the Prince Consort and the Queen. After unwise delay, 
due to fear of popular feeling, the American government 
yielded. The people of the North acquiesced ; but their 
bitterness toward England was intensified. 

In another incident of more serious nature, the English 
government was deeply at fault. In the early years of the 
war, the South succeeded in getting a few cruisers The 
to sea, to prey upon Northern commerce. The ^^'tbama 
most famous one never entered a Confederate port. This 
vessel was built in England. The United States minister 
there, Charles Francis Adams, warned Lord Russell of the 
purpose of the vessel as it neared completion ; but Russell 
was blandly incredulous, and trusted to reports of his subor- 
dinates and to the assurances of the builders that the vessel 
was a peaceful one. Thus the Alabama was allowed to escape 
to sea, where she took on her armament and soon became a 



55^ THE CIVIL WAR, 1861-1865 

terror to the Northern merchant marine — until she was over- 
taken and sunk by the Kearsarge. The North was inclined 
to believe that the English government acted in bad faith. 
But it is now clear that Russell was guilty only of culpable 
negligence — of which he afterward made public confession, 
and for which his country afterward atoned so far as possible 
by paying the "Alabama claims." 

More serious still would have been the barely defeated proj- 
ect of the South to build two ironclad rams in England, 
with which to break the blockade. These formidable vessels 
were nearly ready for sea; and Mr. Adams' remonstrances 
apparently had moved Lord Russell only to ineffectual pre- 
cautions. At the last moment, Adams wrote to Russell, 
" It would be superfluous for me to point out to your lordship 
that this is war.'' But Russell had already awakened, and 
had just given effectual orders to seize the vessels. 

France, too, felt the lack of cotton, though far less than 
England, and the Emperor Napoleon III would have liked 
French to See the Union broken up, so as to give him a free 

sympathies hand in Mexico (page 565 below) . Accordingly, he 
made specific proposals to the English government to join 
hands in recognizing the South and breaking the blockade. 
These repeated overtures were always refused by England. With 
perfect right, Cobden wrote to Sunuier (Morley's Cobden, 
II, 408) : "You must not forget that we have been the only 
obstacle to what would have been almost a European rec- 
ognition of the South." 

And after the Emancipation Proclamation had put the 
North in the true light in the matter of slavery, all English 
hostility was hushed. English workingmen thronged great 
public meetings to voice loud enthusiasm for the Union ; 
and Cobden wrote jubilantly that any ministry which 
should dare to commit any act unfriendly to America would 
be instantly driven from power. 

The North, then, had some cause to blame the govern- 
ment and the aristocracy of England. It had greater 
cause, not always duly recognized, for deep gratitude to 
the sound heart of the English masses, who felt dimly that 



AND ITS COST 553 

the Union was fighting slavery, even while Unionists denied 
it loudly, and who therefore gave the North a heroic sup- 
port through cruel privations — in many ways as 
severe as those borne by Americans. Says Von ^mVrica 
Hoist of this matter: "The attitude of the Eng- to English 
lish workingmen is one of the great deeds in the men""^" 
world's history." They stood nobly by the cause 
of democracy and free labor, as their own cause ; and their 
attitude was so determined that, even though they had no 
votes, their aristocratic government did not venture to take 
offensive action against America. It should be remembered, 
too, that, in the darkest hour, there were not wanting 
English leaders, like Richard Cobden, John Bright, and John 
Stuart Mill, to give enthusiastic support to the North. 

The war cost more than 700,000 lives, — the loss nearly 
even between North and South. "The nation was lastingly 
impoverished by that awful hemorrhage." As The cost 
many men more had their lives sadly shortened °* *^® ^^^ 
or rendered miserable by disease or wounds. Other darkened 
lives, in homes from which the light had gone out, cannot be 
computed. Nor can we count the heaviest cost of all, the 
lowering of moral tone, and the habits of vice, that came from 
life in camp and barracks.^ In money, the war cost the Union 
government about three and a half billions, nearly three bil- 
lions of which remained as a huge national debt to plague the 
next generation. The destruction of property, principally 
in the South, amounted to nearly as much more. 

Still, this expenditure of blood and treasure was well worth 
while. The war struck shackles from four million men. It 
ended forever the ideas of constitutional nullifica- And its 
tion and of peaceful secession. It decided, beyond ^^^^^ 
further appeal, that the United States is a Nation, not a con- 
federacy. It was the means whereby the more progressive por- 

^ The women and other non-combatants of both South and North spent them- 
selves nobly in hospital service ; but science did not know how to heal or to protect, 
as it does now. And the splendid work of our many organizations in the World 
War to proxdde material comforts and mental recreation and uplift was almost 
wholly lacking. 



554 THE CIVIL WAR, 1861-1865 

tion of the country had to force its advanced political thought and 
its better labor system upon the weaker, stationary portion. 
It prevented the break-up of the country into squabbhng 
communities, to be engaged in incessant bickerings over 
trade and boundaries, and it preserved the vast breadth of 
the continent for peace. It demonstrated to skeptical 
European aristocracies that the great Republic was not 
"a bubble," but "the most solid fact in history." 

One part of the cost is yet to be counted. April 14, 
1865, while the North was still blazing with illuminations 
The death over the Surrender of Lee's army, it was plunged 
of Lincoln |jj^q gloom by the assassination of Lincoln. The 
great President was murdered by a crazed actor, a sympa- 
thizer of the South. No man was left to stand between North 
and South as mediator, and to bind up the wounds of the 
Nation with great-hearted pity and all-sufficing influence, as 
Lincoln could have done. His death was an incomparable 
loss to the South. It added fierce flame to the spirit of ven- 
geance at the North, and it explains in part the blunders and 
sins of the Republican party in the "Reconstruction" that 
followed the war. 




Abraham Lincoln 

"... that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, 
and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people, 
shall not perish from the earth.'''' 



CHAPTER XXXV 

RECONSTRUCTION 

Peace brought new problems. The North paid off its 
milHon men under arms, and sent them to their homes at 
the rate of one or two hundred thousand a month. ^^^^^ 
At the close of 1865, only some fifty thousand re- of the 
mained, to garrison the South. The disbanded 
"old soldiers" found place in the industry of the country 
without disturbing the usual order. In part this remarkable 
fact was due to "free land." Many thousands who saw no 
opening in their old homes became "homesteaders" in the 
West. The government, too, sharply reduced internal taxes. 
At the same time, after 1869, it cut down the huge national 
debt resolutely — - so that by 1890 half of it had been paid, 
including the paper money. 

For the wrecked South, the problems were infinitely more 
difficult. Its "old soldiers" toiled homeward painfully, 
mostly on foot, from Northern prison camps and from 
surrendered armies. In some districts, remote from the 
march of the Union armies, there was still abundance of food, 
with the Negroes at work in the fields ; but over wide areas 
the returned soldier found his home in ashes, his stock carried 
off, his family scattered, the labor system utterly gone. 
Many an aristocrat, who in April had ruled a veteran regi- 
ment, in July was hunting desperately for a mule,^ that he 
might plow an acre or two, to raise food wherewith to keep 
his delicately nurtured family from starvation. The destruc- 
tion of bridges and tearing up of railroads left the various 
districts isolated ; and industrial life had to be built up 
again from primitive conditions. No praise is too great 

^ At Lee's surrender, General Grant, with characteristic good sense and gener- 
osity, had told the men to keep their horses, which, said he, they would need for the 
spring work. This practice, followed by other Union commanders, lightened in 
some slight degree the suffering of the South. 

555 



556 RECONSTRUCTION, 1865-187(5 

for the quiet heroism with which the men of the South set 
themselves to this crushing task. 

Before the end of the war, the Negroes had begun to flock 
to the Federal camps ; and, in March, 1865, Congress had 
The found it necessary to establish a "Freedman's 

Negroes Bureau," — to feed these helpless multitudes, to 
start schools for them, and to stand to them in the place of 
guardian. This organization rendered great service ; but, in 
spite of all it could do, hundreds of thousands of ex-slaves 
drifted aimlessly about the country for months. To many of 
them, freedom meant chiefly idleness. Others had caught up 
a strange delusion that the government was going to give to 
each one "forty acres and a mule." When starvation finally 
drove them back to desultory work, the habits they had 
formed led to much violence and crime. 

The problems for the South were (1) to find food for its 
people ; (2) to protect and control and uplift the Negro and 
bring him back into the industrial system ; (3) to 
problems build new State governments ; and (4) to restore 
of the these reconstructed States to their old relation to 

the Union. Unfortunately, in practice, the second 
and third of these problems had to depend upon the fourth ; 
and this problem the victorious North, after the assassination 
of Lincoln and the return of its emaciated prisoners, was in no 
mood to solve in the best way. For twelve years (1865-1876), 
though war had ceased, a "state of war" continued. The 
South was garrisoned by Federal troops, and much of it was 
ruled by conquering generals as though it were a hostile 
country. Political organization was more completely wrecked 
even than the industrial system. The military government 
preserved order ; but civil liberties were in doubt, and civil 
government was lacking. 

Lincoln had held that the "States" could not go out of 
the Union, and that their normal relations to the Union 
Lincoln's were merely interrupted temporarily by illegal 
plan for re- "combinations of individuals." Even while the 
cons rue ion ^^^ ^^^^ ^^ progress, he had tried to "reconstruct" 
such States as had been occupied by the Union armies. 



ANDREW JOHNSON AND CONGRESS 557 

"Louisiana," said he, in 1862, when the Confederate armies 
had been driven from that State, "has nothing to do now 
but to take her place in the Union as it was — barring the 
broken eggs." In 1863 he issued a proclamation of amnesty 
for all Southerners (with a few specified exceptions) who 
would take an oath of allegiance to the Union ; and he 
promised to recognize any State government set up by 
such persons, — if only they made 10 per cent of the number 
of voters in 1860. 

But more "radical" Republicans began to fear that the 
"rebels," getting back so easily into the Union, might win 
control of the Federal government and undo the results of 
the war. So in July, 1864, Congress passed the "Davis- 
Wade bill," to make the process of reconstruction more 
diflficult and to place control of it in Congress. Lin- 
coln killed this bill by a pocket veto ; and during the sum- 
mer recess of Congress, upon his own responsibility, he 
" recognized" the "ten per cent governments" in Arkansas, 
Louisiana, and Tennessee. Later, like action was taken for 
Virginia. But Representatives and Senators from these 
States had not been admitted by Congress when Vice Presi- 
dent Johnson became President. 

Andrew Johnson was the son of "Poor White" parents, 
and had learned to write only after marriage, from his wife. 
His youth was passed as an apprentice to a tailor, and he 
afterward followed that trade (page 437). He Andrew 
had great native ability and a rugged integrity. Johnson 
Even in the aristocratic South, before the war, he had risen 
from his tailor's bench to the governorship of his State and 
to a seat in Congress, He had never been a Republican ; 
but he had been a devoted "Union man" in Tennessee, and 
in 1863-1864 he had shown courage and force of character 
as military governor there under Lincoln. The Republican 
National Convention of 1864 nominated him for the Vice 
Presidency in recognition of the nation's debt to the "War 
Democrats." But, with all his ability and honesty, Johnson 
never made good the defects of his early training. He was 
unduly pugnacious, sadly lacking in tact and good taste, 



658 RECONSTRUCTION, 1865-1876 

and much given to loud boasting and to abusive speech. 
Always bitter toward opponents, he had been particularly 
bitter toward "rebels," so that Radical Republicans, though 
shocked at Lincoln's death, felt that the country was now 
safer. As soon as Johnson had taken the oath of office, a 
committee of the Republican extremists called upon him. 
Senator "Ben" Wade greeted him: "Johnson, we have 
faith in you. By the gods, there will be no trouble now in 
running the government." 

Soon, however, Johnson amazed and disappointed his 
"Radical" friends by taking up reconstruction just where 
Adopts Lincoln had left it — but with infinitely less 

Lincoln's chauce of succcss. Before Congress met in De- 
^*° cember, he "recognized" State governments in 

all the remaining States of the old Confederacy, essentially 
on Lincoln's plan. In each State a convention repealed the 
ordinance of secession, repudiated any share in the Con- 
federate war debt, and adopted a constitution. Under this 
constitution, the people chose a legislature and a gov- 
ernor. The legislature was required, before the State 
government was "recognized," to ratify the Thirteenth 
amendment. Thereujjon President Johnson proclaimed 
civil government fully restored. The legislatures then 
passed laws to restore industry, and chose Senators and 
Representatives for Congress — who, however, were never 
to take their seats. 

For the North was taking alarm. In the "reconstructed" 
States, the governors and Congressmen were ex-Confederate 
generals. Such men were the only natural leaders of their 
people ; but the North could not understand this fact, nor 
could it believe that these "rebel brigadiers" had accepted 
the result of the war in good faith. 

Much cause for irritation, too, was found in the laws of the 
reconstructed legislatures about the freedmen. In at 
least three States, a magistrate might arrest an idle Negro 
as a vagrant, fine him, and sell him into service to work 
out the fine. In some States a like penalty was imposed 
for petty larceny; and a common feature of these "Black 



ALARM AT THE NORTH 559 

Codes" was the provision that a court might "apprentice" 
Negro minors. The Southerner felt sure that the de- 
moralized Blacks could not be kept in order or -j-j^^ ff^^i^ 
made self-supporting without such laws ; and most demands 
of this legislation is approved to-day by Northern scmth^^ve 
scholars.^ But at the moment it seemed to the Negroes 
the North a defiant attempt to reenslave "per- ^°*®^ 
sons of color." Northern opinion, therefore, demanded 
that all the "Presidential reconstruction" should be un- 
done, until the Southern States should repeal the "Black 
laws" and grant the franchise to the Blacks, — to enable 
those wards of the nation to protect themselves. 

Lincoln had advised his reconstructed governments 
that they would do well to give the franchise to Negroes 
who had fought for the Union or who could pass an educa- 
tional test; and President Johnson repeatedly urged a 
like policy. But no one of the reconstructed legislatures 
paid attention to such counsel. For this there is little 
wonder. Only six Northern States allowed the Negro 
to vote at this time, and in this same year (1865), State 
conventions in Wisconsin, Connecticut, and Minnesota 
refused the privilege. Again, in 1867-1868, Minnesota, 
Michigan, Ohio, and Kansas, by popular vote, rejected 
constitutional amendments providing for Negro suffrage. 

In Congress, Senator Sumner now held that the Southern 
States, by secession, had "committed State-suicide" and 
had reverted to the position of Territories, subject 
of course to Congressional regulation. In the sumner and 
lower House, Thaddeus Stevens insisted upon the Thaddeus 
more extreme view that the South was a "con- 
quered province," so that its people had no claim even to 
civil rights. Sumner was an unselfish idealist, but un- 

' "This legislation, far from embodying any spirit of defiance towards the 
North . . . was in the main a conscientious and straightforward attempt to bring some 
sort of order out of the social and economic chaos." — Dunning, Reconstruction ("Amer- 
ican Nation" series), 57-58. "The trend ol legislation . . . was distinctly favor- 
able to the Negro." — Rhodes, VI, 27. 



560 RECONSTRUCTION, 1865-1876 

practical and bigoted, with the one idea of doing justice 
to the Negro. Stevens was an unscrupulous politician 
and a vindictive partisan, determined to entrench Re- 
publican rule by Negro majorities in Southern States, and 
not averse incidentally to punishing "rebels." The spirit 
of reckless retribution which stained the National legislation 
of the next months was due mainly to his harsh influence. 
And more and more, as the contest progressed, the Re- 
publican majority in Congress was actuated also by a desire 
to humiliate the President — and moved step by step to 
a recklessness that is strangely like that manifested in a like 
struggle at the close of the World War. 

At the first roll call of the new Congress, the clerk, under 
Stevens' direction, omitted the reconstructed States, so 
And that their representatives were not recognized. 

Congres- Later, the question of the readmission of those 
reconstruc- States to the Union was referred to a joint com- 
tion mittee of the two Houses, — which then held the 

matter skillfully in abeyance. Meantime, over the Presi- 
dent's veto, a Civil Rights Bill placed the civil equality of 
the Negro directly under the protection of the Federal 
courts — rather than of the State courts. Then, to make 
the same principle still more secure, Congress submitted to 
the States the Fourteenth Amendment. 

This measure held out to the South an inducement to give 
the suffrage to the Negro — in the provision that if a State 
denied the suffrage to any citizens, its representation in Con- 
gress might be correspondingly reduced. But it also dis- 
qualified from ofiice large classes of leading Southerners 
such as made up the reconstructed governments. Accord- 
ingly it was promptly rejected by Southern legislatures. 

Congress then (March 2, 1867) began its own system of 
Reconstruction. It divided the old Confederacy (except 
Military Tennessee, which had ratified the amendment) 
"^® mio five military districts. Each district was placed 

under an army general, who, in practice, set aside at will 
the laws of the existing Southern legislatures, overruled the 
decisions of courts, appointed municipal authorities, and 



NEGRO RULE IN THE SOUTH 561 

aimed in general to exercise a minute paternal despotism. 
This military rule was to continue until the following process 
should be complete: (1) Each commander was to register 
the voters in each State in his district, including the Negroes 
and excluding certain large classes of leading ex-Confederates. 
(2) State conventions, chosen by these voters, must ratify the 
Fourteenth amendment and (3) adopt new State consti- 
tutions, — which must be satisfactory to Congress and 
which, in particular, must provide for future Negro suffrage. 
(4) These constitutions must then be ratified by the registered 
voters. (5) A State which complied with these requirements 
might be readmitted to the Union by Congress. 

By June, 1868, six States had been reconstructed on this 
basis. Virginia, Mississippi, Georgia, and Texas preferred 
military rule for three years more. Meantime Congress 
added the Fifteenth amendment to the requirements for re- 
admission. 

Annoyed by Johnson's futile veto messages. Congress now 
determined to impeach him. Johnson had been foolish and 
coarse ; but he had administered his high oflBce Attempt to 
with scrupulous fidelity, and had enforced vigor- impeach 
ously even the laws he most disapproved. The °^°" 
impeachment was a frank attempt to depose him because 
he differed with the majority of Congress. It failed (May, 
1868) for want of one vote ; but every Northern Senator 
who voted against this partisan degradation of the presi- 
dency lost his seat at the first subsequent election. The 
North was even more mad than Congress. 

A few months later, the Republicans elected General 
Grant to the Presidency in an enthusiastic campaign, by 
214 electoral votes to 80. Still in the popular Election 
vote. Grant had a majority of only 300,000 out of »* ^^^""^ 
6,000,000. Part of the Southern States, too, were still un- 
reconstructed, and had no vote ; while the others were 
controlled by Republican "carpetbaggers." 

Meantime, the atrocious Reconstruction Acts had been 
followed by anarchy and misgovernment in the South. In 
a few weeks, thousands of Northern adventurers, drawn by 



562 RECONSTRUCTION, 1865-187G 

scent of plunder, had thronged thither to exploit the ignorant 
Negro vote and to organize it as the Republican party. ^ 
Negro These "carpetbaggers," joined by a few even more 

"^® detested "scalawags" (Southern Whites, largely 

of the former overseer class) , with grossly ignorant ex-slaves, 
made up the bulk of the constitutional conventions and of 
the State legislatures that followed. Says Woodrow Wilson, 
"A carnival of public crime set in under the forms of law." 
Irresponsible or rascally legislatures ruined the war-impover- 
ished South over again by stupendous taxes, bearing mainly 
on the property of the disfranchised Whites. In Mississippi 
a fifth of the total area of the State was sold for unpaid taxes. 
In New Orleans the rate of taxation rose to 6 per cent, which 
meant confiscation. Enormous State debts, too, were 
piled up, to burden the future. Crime against individuals 
was rampant ; and vicious Negroes heaped indignities upon 
former masters. History has no parallel to this legal 
revolution whereby a civilized society was subjected to 
ruin and insult by an ignorant barbarism led by brutal 
and greedy renegades. Says Rhodes {History, VI, 35) : 
"Stevens' Reconstruction Acts, ostensibly in the interests 
of freedom, were an attack on Civilization.'' 

The Southern Whites, it should have been foreseen, would 
soon overthrow this vile supremacy, or perish. Peaceful 
And the and legal rneans for preserving White civilization 
Ku-Kiux there were none; open rebellion against Negro 
domination, while it was supported by Federal bayonets, 
was equally impossible ; and so the Whites had recourse to 
the only available methods, — which were very deplorable 
ones. Says William Garrett Brown {Lower South), "Never 
before had an end so clearly worth fighting for been so 
clearly unattainable by any good means." Secret Ku-Klux- 
Klans intimidated Negro majorities by mysterious warn- 
ings ; and midnight patrols of white-robed, masked horsemen 
flogged many men and hanged some. By the close of 1870, 

^ A favorite device, when one was needed, was to show the illiterate and credulous 
Negroes an "order" purporting to be signed by General Grant, commanding them 
to vote the Republican ticket. 



I 



CONGRESS AND THE JUDICIARY 563 

the North had in law imposed its system of reconstruction 
upon the South : in actual fact, the South was rapidly car- 
rying out a counter-revolution. 

In 1872 public feeling at the North compelled Congress 
to restore political rights to the ex-Confederates except for a 
few leaders, and the union of the Whites in one Restoration 
party gave them a majority in most States over of pouticai 
the Negroes. Thereafter they used little violence ; "^^*^ 
but they continued to exclude most Negroes from the polls 
by threats of non-employment or by persuasion or by vague 
intimidation. For a while, the Federal government secured 
the victory of Carpet-bag State governments by giving them 
the use of Federal troops at the elections ; but this process 
became increasingly distasteful to President Grant and to 
the country. By 1875, Tennessee, Virginia, Georgia, and 
North Carolina had reverted to White rule; and the other 
Southern States did so in the election of 1876 or as a result 
of the settlement following that election. 

Throughout "Reconstruction," Congress showed a high- 
handed determination to override the Judiciary, as it over- 
rode the Executive, whenever necessary to carry congress 
its point. It had suspended the writ of Habeas and the 
Corpus in the North during the war, and had ^^ *""^ 
authorized the punishment of suspected "rebel sympa- 
thizers" by military courts. While the war lasted, the 
Federal judiciary had been unwilling to interfere with these 
courts martial, dangerous as they were to private liberty; 
but in 1866 the Supreme Court did at last declare that all 
such military commissions for the trial of citizens, in dis- 
tricts where the ordinary courts were open, had been 
unconstitutional . 

The "Radical" majority in Congress feared that the Court 
would go on to upset their program for military rule in the 
South, and raved wildly against the decision. Stevens at 
once introduced a bill to make it impossible for the Court 
to set aside laws of Congress thereafter except by a unanimous 
vote. The bill was not pressed to a vote, but was held over 



564 RECONSTRUCTION, 1865-1876 

the Judiciary as a threat. The Court, accordingly, grew 
cautious. When President Johnson's reconstructed State 
governments appealed to it for protection against the military 
rule set over them by the Reconstruction Acts, it declared 
it had no jurisdiction in such "political cases." At a later 
period, however, in the famous "Slaughter House cases" 
of 1883, it did take from the Negroes the security for civil 
equality which the Fourteenth amendment had been in- 
tended to give them. Since that time the social relations 
of the Blacks have been regulated by State governments. 

The "Legal Tender decisions" showed another way in 
which the Supreme Court might be subject to control in times 
The Legal ^^ strong popular feeling. The Legal Tender Act 
Tender of 1862 (page 532) had made "greenbacks" lawful 

ecisions ^^^ ^^^^^ j^^ debts Contracted before the passage of 
the law. This provision of the law the Court declared un- 
constitutional, February 7, 1870. Chief Justice Chase, who 
as Secretary of the Treasury had devised the law, wrote the 
decision ; and the vote stood four to three. But one Jus- 
tice had died just before, and Congress had provided for 
one additional new member. President Grant now filled 
both places — the day this decision was handed down. A 
new case was promptly brought before the new Court. 
The new appointees voted with the former minority, and 
the law was upheld, five to four. 

Loud complaint was made — even by the C]^ief Justice — 
that the President and Senate had "packed the Court" to 
secure this reversal. In the grossest form, this accusation 
was certainly untrue. The nominations had been settled 
upon before the first decision was made public. But the 
country was sharply divided upon the issue, and the stand 
of the nominees on the matter was known before they were 
confirmed. The rising labor parties charged that the 
appointment was influenced, in part at least, by great 
corporations whose long-term bonds, about to expire, would 
have had to be paid in gold under the first decision, but 
which they now paid in the depreciated greenbacks — 
gaining millions for corporation cofifers. 



THE ALABAMA ARBITRATION 565 

The Reconstruction period saw three important inci- 
dents connected with foreign relations. 

1. In Johnson's administration, the United States bought 
from Russia, for $7,200,000, the immensely rich realm of 
Alaska — then valued mainly for its furs. 

2. The same administration victoriously vindicated the 
Monroe Doctrine. During our war, England, France, and 
Spain had united in a military "demonstration," 

to secure from Mexico the payment of debts due withdraws 
their citizens. England and Spain soon withdrew ^°™ 
from the movement because it became plain that 
Napoleon III of France was aiming at much more than 
collection of debts. Then Napoleon established Maxi- 
milian, an Austrian Archduke, as Emperor of Mexico, and 
maintained him there by a French army, in spite of vigorous 
protests from Washington. At the close of the war, how- 
ever, American troops were massed on the Rio Grande ; 
and Napoleon withdrew his army. Then the "Emperor" 
was captured and shot by the Mexican Republicans (1867). 

3. Much bitterness was still felt toward England for her 
government's conduct in the matter of the Alabama. But 
in 1867 a franchise reform in that country put jj^g 
power at last in the hands of the workingmen, Alabama 
and a new British ministry showed a desire for 

a fair settlement between the two nations. In the Treaty 
of Washington (1871), England apologized gracefully for 
any remissness on her part in permitting the Confederate 
cruiser to escape, and the question of liability for damages 
was submitted to arbitration. A Tribunal of Arbitration 
met at Geneva, — one member appointed by each of the 
five governments, the United States, England, Switzerland, 
Italy, and Brazil. At first the American government 
claimed huge "indirect damages" — for the cost of pursu- 
ing the Alabama, the longer continuance of the war, and 
the increased rates of insurance on merchant shipping. The 
Tribunal threw out these claims ; but it decided that Eng- 
land had not shown "due diligence" in preventing the sail- 



566 RECONSTRUCTION, 1865-1876 

ing of the Alabama, and that she was therefore responsible 
for all damages to American commerce committed directly 
by that privateer. England paid to the United States the 
award of $15,500,000, to be distributed by us to the owners 
of destroyed property. The amount proved to be exces- 
sive, since claimants for much of it could never be found ; 
but the settlement was honorable to both nations, and it 
made the greatest victory up to that time for the principle 
of arbitration. 



CHAPTER XXXVI 

THE CLOSE OF AN ERA 

In 1872 the Republicans began to divide on the question 
of military rule in the South. The conviction was growing 
that the North needed its energies at home. A The election 
"Liberal Republican" Convention nominated 0^1872 
Horace Greeley for the presidency, on a platform calling 
for civil-service reform and for leaving the South to solve 
its own problems. The Democrats accepted program and 
candidate ; but they felt no enthusiasm for Greeley, a life- 
long, violent opponent, — and the "regular" Republicans 
reelected Grant triumphantly. 

His second term, however, proved a period of humiliation 
for the simple-minded soldier. His confidence was abused 
basely by political "friends," and he showed himself a 
babe in their unscrupulous hands. The public service had 
become honeycombed with corruption. In 1875 Benjamin 
H. Bristow, Secretary of the Treasury, unearthed extensive 
frauds whereby high officials had permitted a "Whisky 
Ring" to cheat the government of millions of the internal 
revenue. Babcock, the President's private secretary, was 
deeply implicated, and Grant showed an ill-advised eager- 
ness to save him from prosecution, while he allowed the 
friends of the convicted criminals to drive Bristow from 
office. Grant, himself, on a visit to St. Louis, had been 
lavishly entertained by a leading member of the "ring," 
and had even accepted from him a fine span of horses. 

In 1876 Belknap, Secretary of War, was found to have 
accepted bribes, year after year, for appointments to office 
in the department of Indian affairs. Of course the officials 
who paid the bribes had enriched themselves by robbing 
the Indians. The Democratic House (see elections of 1874, 

567 



568 



RECONSTRUCTION, 1865-1876 



below) began to impeach Belknap, but the President per- 
mitted him to escape punishment by accepting his resig- 
nation. 



Ulysses 

Simpson 

Grant 



Low, however, as the honor of the government had fallen, 
no one, then or later, imputed personal dishonesty to the 
modest, honest-minded President. Ulysses S. 
Grant is a unique figure among the world's 
rulers, and yet a typical American. His early life 
was spent in frontier Ohio. He became a West Pointer, 

graduating with a rank 
midway in his class. He 
served with credit in the 
Mexican War (of which 
he strongly disapproved, 
as he did of most wars) , 
and rose from second 
lieutenant to captain. 
In 1854 he resigned his 
commission and took his 
family to a small farm 
ten miles from St. Louis 
— to whose streets in 
winter he hauled cord 
wood, dressed, his biog- 
raphers like to tell us, 
in a rather ragged old 
army overcoat. After 
six distressing years of 
a not very successful 
struggle with hard condi- 
tions. Grant left "Hard- 
scrabble," and the log-hut he had built there with his own 
hands, to enter his father's store in Galena, Illinois. At 
thirty-nine he was written down a failure in most men's 
minds. Strong drink had secured a sad influence upon him, 
— and this reputation followed him into his most glorious 
period. During the critical days of his services in the Civil 




^ 



Brady Photograph. 
Ulysses S. Grant in 1865. 



ULYSSES SIMPSON GRANT 569 

War, a deputation of Northern whisky-hating gentlemen 
called upon President Lincoln to protest against the reten- 
tion in high command of a drinker. Lincoln (who had been 
greatly attracted to the silent general who did things, instead 
of asking always for more means to do them) met the situa- 
tion with a piece of characteristic humor — ' Did the depu- 
tation know what brand of whisky Grant drank? He 
would like to send some to his other generals.' For the 
war had given Grant his opportunity ; and, despite his later 
failures, the verdict of his countrymen. North and South, 
is that voiced in Lowell's lines : — 

"He came grim-silent, saw, and did the deed 
That was to do. In his master's grip, 
Our swords flashed joyous : no skill of words could breed 
Such sure conviction as that close-clamped lip. 

" Yet did this man, war-tempered, stern as steel 
When steel opposed, prove soft in civil sway. 
The hand, hilt-hardened, had lost tact to feel 
The world's base coin ; and glossing knaves made prey 
Of him and of the entrusted Commonweal. 

" We turn our eyes away, and so will Fame, 
As if in his last battle he had died 
Victor for us and spotless of all blame, 
Doer of hopeless tasks which praters shirk. 
One of those still, plain men who do the world's rough work." 

The main proof of corruption in Congress was connected 
with the Union Pacific Railroad. For ten years before the 
Civil War, ever since the discovery of gold in Cali- The Union 
fornia, the country had discussed the building of Pacific 
a transcontinental railway. In 1862 Congress gave right 
of way through the Territories from Omaha to California 
to a corporation known as the Union Pacific, — with a 
grant also of twenty square miles of land along each mile 
of road, and a "loan" of $50,000,000. In 1869 the two 
lines, building from the east and from the west, met in Utah. 



570 



THE CLOSE OF RECONSTRUCTION 



The nation had been so dazzled by the romance of carry- 
ing an iron road from ocean to ocean through two thousand 
Land miles of "desert" that it had been exceedingly 

grants to carelcss of its own interests. The fifty million 
rai oa s dollar loan was inadequately secured, and never 
repaid. That sum, with the land grants, more than built 
the road — ■ which, however, was left altogether in private 
hands. The only new feature about this was the huge size 
of the grant. As early as 1850, Congress gave Illinois 
3,000,000 acres from the Public Domain within that State 




RAILWAY LAND GRANTS 
1850 - 1871 

Bu«l on > map in Donililara' • P«Hf> 



for the Illinois Central Railroad. The State legislature 
then transferred the grant, as was intended, to the com- 
pany building the road. Immense grants of like character 
were made to other Western States. In 1856 twenty million 
acres were given away. Mild attempts by the legislatures 
and by Congress to couple the gifts with conditions to 
secure the public interest achieved little success. After 
the war,, still more immense gifts were made, by Congress 
directly, from the Domain in the Territories. In the 
shaded part of the map above, every alternate section was 



THE CREDIT MOBILIER SCANDAL 571 

granted for the construction of some road. (Texas had no 
National land within it; and none was granted in Okla- 
homa, then Indian Territory. The huge State grants are 
not shown on this map.) 

Worse than this waste of the people's property was a 
steal within the Company. A group of leading stockholders 
of the Union Pacific formed themselves into an "inside" 
company known as the " Credit Mobilier." Then, as stock- 
holders of the Union Pacific, they looted that company by 
voting to the Credit Mobilier extravagant sums for construct- 
ing the road. This was the first notorious use of a device 
that the coming decades were to make disgracefully familiar. 

And worse than this steal by private individuals was the 
accompanying corruption in Congress. The Credit Mobilier 
feared that its robbery might be stopped by Con- ^j^^ credit 
gressional action. To prevent that, it gave shares Mobilier 
of its highly profitable stock, or sold them far be- ^^^° * 
low market rates, to Congressmen. Oakes Ames, the agent 
of the Company, wrote his associates that he had placed 
the shares "where they will do us the most good." The 
matter leaked out; and Congress had to "investigate." 
It censured two members, against whom it found absolute 
proof of corruption, and excused from punishment various 
others, smirched in the transaction, on the peculiar ground 
that they had not understood that Ames meant to corrupt 
them. Still others, including the Vice President, were 
left under grave suspicion. 

The people of the North were growing weary of military 
rule in the South, and they were sickened by the corruption 
in high places in the National government. The Election 
elections of '74 gave the Democrats a large major- °* ^^''^ 
ity in the lower House of Congress, and placed them in 
control in several Northern State governments. Then the 
presidential election of 1876 closed the long era of political 
reconstruction. The Democrats nominated Samuel J. 
Tilden of New York, a prominent reformer, and adopted 
a "reform" platform. The Republicans named as their 



572 THE LEGACY OF RECONSTRUCTION 

candidate Rutherford B. Hayes ^ of Ohio, and appealed 
chiefly to war-time prejudices by a vigorous "waving of 
the bloody shirt." 

On the morning after election, papers of both parties 
announced a Democratic victory. That party had safely 
The carried every "doubtful" Northern State (New 

disputed York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Indiana), 
^***®^ and, on the face of the returns, they had majori- 

ties in every Southern State. They claimed 204 electoral 
votes to 165. But in Louisiana, Florida, and South Caro- 
lina, carpetbagger governments, hedged by Federal bayo- 
nets, would have the canvassing of the returns, and they 
were promptly urged by desperate Republican politicians 
in the North to secure a favorable count. The carpet- 
bagger officials proved easily equal to the emergency. On 
the alleged ground of fraud and of intimidation to Negro 
voters, they threw out the votes of enough districts to 
declare the Republican electors chosen. In Oregon one of 
the Republican electors who had been chosen proved to be 
a postmaster ; but the Constitution declares Federal offi- 
cials ineligible to such position. In these four States two 
sets of electors secured credentials from rival State govern- 
ments or conflicting officials, and double sets of votes were 
sent to Washington. Twenty votes were in dispute. Hayes 
could not be elected loithout every one of them. Any one of 
them would elect Tilden. 

Louisiana was perhaps the most trying case. There the 
Democratic ticket had a majority of more than 6000, in 
spite of the fact that the canvassing boards freely em- 
ployed "perjury, forgery, and shameless manipulation of 
the returns before publication" (Dunning, Reconstruction ^ 

' James G. Blaine, for many years preceding 1874 the Speaker of the House, 
had been a leading candidate. Shortly before the convention met, however, 
he was accused of complicity in the Credit Mobilier scandal. The evidence 
was supposed to be contained in letters from Blaine to a certain Mulligan. On 
pretense of examining these letters, Blaine got hold of them and never permitted 
them to pass again from his hands. He read parts from them in a dramatic 
"justihcation" of himself before the House; but the "Mulligan Letters" made 
this "magnetic" statesman thereafter an impossible candidate for National favor. 



AMERICA'S RACE PROBLEM 573 

316). But the canvassing board "threw out returns on 
vague rumor and unsupported assertion," and "ignored 
technical irregularities in returns that favored Republicans, 
but used the same defects as a ground for rejecting returns 
that favored the Democrats." Such methods manufactured 
a Republican majority of 3500. 

How should it be decided which sets were valid ? The Con- 
stitution was unhappily vague. Congress could not easily 
agree upon a law, because the lower House was ^j^^ .. -^^ 
Democratic and the Senate Republican. Injudi- to seven " 
cious leadership might easily have plunged the ^^^^^°^ 
Nation again into civil war, which this time would not have 
been sectional. Finally (January, 1877), Congress created 
the famous Electoral Commission of fifteen, to pass upon 
the disputes, — five members chosen by the House, five 
by the Senate, and five justices of the Supreme Court, of 
which last five three were Republicans. After many pain- 
ful weeks, by a strict party vote, the Commission decided 
every disputed point in favor of the Republicans. The 
end was reached only two days before the date for the 
inauguration of the new President. 

The "eight to seven" decisions became a by-word in 
politics, and they are generally regarded as proof that 
even members of the Supreme Court were controlled by 
partisan bias. But this discreditable result was more than 
offset by the notable spectacle of half a nation submitting 
quietly, even in time of intense party feeling, to a decision 
that had the form of law. Rarely, in any country, has 
free government been subjected to such a strain — or 
withstood one so triumphantly. 

After all, the South reaped the fruits of victory. Presi- 
dent Hayes at once removed the Federal garrisons. Then 
the State governments to which his election had been due 
immediately vanished, and the South was left to work out 
its salvation for itself as best it could. 

Slavery and the blunders of Reconstruction have left 
America burdened with a frightful race problem. Southern 



574 THE LEGACY OF RECONSTRUCTION 

Whites have continued to agree in the necessity for keeping 
the Negro from the polls, — at least wherever his vote 
The South flight be a real factor, — and that race remains 
and the practically destitute of political privilege. To 
^^° keep it so, there has been created and preserved 

for a third of a century "the Solid South," in close alliance 
with the Democratic party, without the possibility of 
natural and wholesome division upon other issues. 

In 1890 the Republicans in Congress attempted to restore 
Federal supervision of congressional and presidential elec- 
tions. The "Lodge Force Bill" failed, partly from the 
opposition of northern capital invested now in Southern 
manufactures. But the South took warning, and began to 
protect its policy by the forms of constitutional right. The 
States adopted property qualifications and educational tests 
for the franchise. Mississippi led off (1890) by prescribing 
payment of a poll tax and the ability to read or understand 
the Constitution. Only 37,000 of the 147,000 adult Negro 
males could read ; few of these paid the tax ; and White 
oflBcials decide whether a would-be voter understands the Con- 
stitution. Such qualifications, in practice, too, are invoked 
only against the Negro, not against the illiterate White. 
Sometimes the latter is protected further by the notorious 
"Grandfather clause," expressly declaring that the restric- 
tions shall not exclude any one who could vote prior to 
January 1, 1861, or who is the son or grandson of such voter. 
In 1916, an extreme provision of this sort in Oklahoma was 
declared unconstitutional by the Federal Courts. 

On the side of civil equality, as we have noted, the Four- 
teenth Amendment is even more a dead letter. Just at the 
close of Reconstruction (in 1875), Congress made a final 
attempt to secure for Negroes the same accommodations 
as for Whites in hotels, railways, and theaters. In 1883, 
however, the Supreme Court declared the law uncon- 
stitutional when in conflict with State authority (page 564). 
Accordingly, the two races in the South live without social 
mingling. 

The special cry of the South is "race integrity." Inter- 



AMERICAS RACE PROBLEM 575 

marriage, it is insisted, shall not be permitted : therefore 
there must be no social intercourse on terms of equality. 
Many leaders of the Negro race, too, like the late Booker 
Washington of Tuskegee and his successor, Charles Moten, 
desire social segregation for the present, — but with a dif- 
ference. To the White, Negro segregation means Negro in- 
feriority. To these Negro leaders, separate cars and separate 
schools for their people mean a better chance for the Negro 
to "find himself" ; but they insist that the "Jim Crow car" 
shall be cared for and equipped as well as the car for Whites 
who pay the same rates, and that Negro schools shall 
receive their proportion of State funds and attention. As 
yet, this goal remains far distant.^ 

1 Southern States authorize cities to shut out Negro homes from residential 
districts which they choose to reserve for Wliites. The Supreme Court has de- 
clared these laws void (November, 1917) — bvt on the ground that the (White) 
owner must not be deprived by the State of his right to sell his property in such districts 
in any way he thinks most profitable. It does not appear that the decision seriously 
threatens "Jim-Crowism." 



PAET XI — A BUSINESS AGE: 1876-1917 

The forty years between Reconstruction and the World 
War belong to "contemporary history." Leading actors 
are still living ; and causes and motives in many cases are 
not yet surely known. The two great phases are an 
enormous ecotiomic and industrial growth, and the rising 




The Capitol at Washington- 

struggle between the people on the one side, and great wealth, 
fortified by special privilege, on the other. 

Wealth is supported by vast numbers of a middle class 
who feel dependent upon it. The labor unions, small as 
their enrollment is in comparison with the total number of 
workers, hold the first trench on the other side, because of 
their admirable organization. Both sides, on the whole, are 
honest; but each believes the other dishonest and un- 

576 



TABLE OF ADMINISTRATIONS 577 

patriotic. Neither can get the other's viewpoint ; and 
each has been guilty of blunders and of sins. Privilege 
believes that the welfare of the country rests on business 
prosperity, and that the government ought to be an adjunct 
of business. Labor regards this attitude as due merely 
to personal greed, and, on its side, wishes government to 
concern itself directly with promoting the welfare of men 
and women. Privilege, by words, proclaims devotion to 
" American " individualism (a safe principle for the strong 
few in contests with a more numerous but divided and weak 
foe), while, by its secret control of the press and the govern- 
ment, it threatens the life of democracy. Labor, to save 
that American principle of democracy, turns from early in- 
dividualism toward collective and cooperative action. Each 
party, quite honestly, denounces the other as unAmerican. 
The student of history may hope that this class war is only a 
necessary stage in progress toward a broader social unity. 

The following table of Administrations may be convenient 
for reference in considering this period. 

Republican Democratic 

\ House Democratic, whole 

1877-1881 HayeJ, ^ P''"'''l. ^. ,__ 

I senate Democratic, 1879- 

l 1881 

1881-1885 Garfield ~ Arthur (House Demo- 
cratic, 1883-1885, almost two to 
one) 

1885-1889 Cleveland (Senate Republican) 

1889-1893 Harrison (House Democratic, 
1891-1893, by 431 to 88) 

1893-1897 Cleveland (Senate and House 

Republican after 189^) 

1897-1901 McKinley 

1901-1905 McKinley — Roosevelt 

1905-1909 Roosevelt 

1909-1913 Taft (House Democratic after 
1910) 

1913-1917 Wilson 

1917-19'21 Wilson (Congress Republican 

after 1918) 

1921- Harding 



CHAPTER XXXVII 

NATIONAL GROWTH 

Between 1860 and 1880, population rose from 31 millions 
to 50 millions — ■ one fourth the gain coming from immigra- 
Growth of tion — and wealth multiplied two and a half 
population times. Since 1880, wealth has grown even more 
rapidly, but population more slowly. In 1890 the United 
States had 63| millions of people, and in 1920, 106 mil- 
lions (not counting the ten millions in the new posses- 
sions acquired from Spain). Recently, the Middle West, 
so long the scene of most rapid increase, has become station- 
ary ; while the manufacturing East and the far West 
have shared between them the greatest growth. In 1860 
cities contained one sixth the population ; in 1880, one 
fourth ; and in 1920, more than one half .^ Less than 
one third the people now live on farms. 

The rate of increase then is very much smaller than in 
our earlier periods, and such increase as we have has come 
immigra- Very largely from without — and from recent 
tion, comers. Immigration was checked by the Civil 

I860 1920 ^ar. In 1883, however, it brought us more than 
700,000 people, and in 1905, more than a million. Until 
1890, immigration remained mainly like that before the 
Civil War — with some increase in the Scandinavian settlers 
in the Northwest. Since that year, more and more, the 
immigrants have come from Southern and Eastern Europe, — 
Italians, Russian Jews, Bohemians, Poles, Hungarians. A 
large part of these Southern European immigrants are illit- 
erate and unskilled, with a "standard of living" lower 
than that of American workingmen. In 1880 they made 
only one twentieth of the immigrants ; in 1900 they made 

^ Fifty-two per cent. All places of more than 2500 people rank as "urban." 

578 



NATIONAL GROWTH 



579 




580 A BUSINESS AGE. 1876-1914 

one fourth ; and the proportion constantly increased up to 
the World War. From 1914 to 1919 immigration brought 
us only some '200,000 a year. At the close of the war, 
indeed, the tide turned for a while the other way, and, for 
a year or so, more European-born residents left us than 
came to us ; but by the middle of 1920 every indication 
pointed to a new rise to the annual million mark. Our 
earlier immigrants sought homes for the most part on 




Copyright, Undtrwuvd a. underwood. 

Ellis Island in New York Harbor, where our annual million are detained for 
examination. The war vessel in the foreground is the German Kaiser Wil- 
hv,hn II, which was visiting in American waters in 1913, when this photograph 
was taken. 

western farms. Those of recent years have settled mainly 
in manufacturing centers. 

When the Civil War began, the thirty-four States made 
a solid block from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, with one 
The Forty- Complete tier on the west bank of that river and 
eight with Texas and California farther west. Kansas 

^*^*^^ was added in 1861 ; Nevada, in '64 ; Nebraska, 

in '67 ; and Colorado became the thirty-eighth State in 
1876. No new State came in for the next thirteen years 



NATIONAL GROWTH 



o81 



— although the increase of population was then still most 
rapid in the agricultural region of the newest "West." In 
the Dakotas, districts without a settler in March were 
sometimes organized counties in November. The two 
Dakota Territories were long kept knocking for admission, 
however, because the Democratic Congress was unwilling 
to add States so sure to reinforce the Republican party. 




CnpijrigM, Underwood <C- Undenrood. 
Future Americans. A photograph of a band of Armenians landed at Ellis 
Island, March 9, 1916, — the advance guard of a body of 4200 who were rescued 
at one time from Turkish massacre during the World War, by a French cruiser 
off the coast of Syria. 

Montana and Washington, on the other hand, were expected 
to strengthen the Democrats; and in 1889 an "omnibus 
bill" admitted all four States. The next year, the admis- 
sion of Idaho and Wyoming gave the first continuous band 
of States from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Utah, though 
prosperous and populous, was kept out for years because of 
its polygamy ; but in 1890, when the Mormon Church re- 
nounced that doctrine, the State was admitted. Oklahoma, 



582 A BUSINESS AGE, 1876-1914 

the old "Indian Territory," came in in 1907, and Arizona 
and New Mexico in 1912. This completed the solid block 
of forty-eight States in the vast region bounded by the two 
oceans, east and west, and by Canada and Mexico north and 
south. Before long, no doubt, the nation will be confronted 
with demands for statehood from distant possessions, — 
Alaska, Hawaii, and Porto Rico. 

After 1880, the "New South" began to reap its share of 
industrial growth. First it seized upon its long-neglected 
The " New advantages for cotton manufacture. Northern 
South" capital built mills along the "Fall Line" (page 
134), and cheap labor was found by inducing the "Poor 
Whites" of the neighboring mountain-folk to gather in 
factory villages, where oftentimes indolent parents lived on 
the earnings of little children. The awakened South began 
also to make use of its mines and forests, — especially of the 
rich coal and iron region stretching from West Virginia 
through Tennessee into Northern Alabama. By 1880, Ala- 
bama was sending pig iron to Northern mills, and soon she 
became herself a great center of steel manufacturing. 

Thus the old agricultural South was transformed into a 
?iew South of varied industries. After 1902, this tendency 
was hastened by the falling off in profits of cotton farm- 
ing due to the increasing ravages of the boll weevil. And 
even agriculture has been transformed. Just after the war, 
attempts were made to cultivate huge plantations of the 
old type with gangs of hired Negroes. This proved a 
losing venture ; and soon the great plantations began to 
break up into smaller holdings, rented on shares to Negroes 
or to Poor Whites. These renters have been growing rapidly 
into owners. The Negro's wholesome ambition to own a 
farm promises to be a chief source of industrial and social 
salvation to his race and to the whole South. 

Railway extension had been checked during the four 
years of war, but the last five years of the sixties almost 
Railway doublcd the mileage of the country. The new 
growth lines were located mainly in the Northwestern 

States and Territories ; and they were busied at first only 



THE RAILWAY 



583 



in carrying settlers to the moving frontier, and then soon 
in bringing back farm produce. From 1873 to 1878, con- 
struction was checked again by one of the periodic business 
panics. Then by 1880, another almost fabulous burst 
raised the mileage to 92,000, and the next ten years nearly 
doubled this, — to 164,000 miles. Since 1890, expansion 
has been less rapid ; but the next twenty years (to 1910) 
raised the total to 237,000 miles. Since 1880 America has 
had a larger ratio of railway mileage to population than 




The Biggest Electric Locomotive. The railroads have kept pace with other 
industries in material development. The electric locomotive here pictured is 
one of forty-two that haul passengers and freight over the great Continental 
Divide, in Montana. It weighs 282 tons, and can haul 3200 tons (six and a 
half million pounds) up a one per cent grade at 16 miles an hour ; or, geared 
for higher speed, it can pull a passenger train of 800 tons on a level at a mile 
a minute. 

any other country. Railroads represent one seventh the 
total wealth of the Nation, and employ more than a million 
men. 

The eighties witnessed also a transformation in the old 
railroads. Heavier steel rails, thanks to the Bessemer in- 
vention, replaced iron. This made possible the use of 
heavier locomotives and of steel cars of greater size; and 
these called in turn for straightening curves, cutting down 
grades, and bettering roadbeds. Such changes "fixed" a 



584 



A BUSINESS AGE, 1876-1914 



large amount of capital, but they greatly reduced the cost 
of transportation. 

More significant than these physical changes was the con- 
solidation of railway management and ownership. In 1860 
RaUway ^^ ^^^ company reached from the Atlantic to 
consoiida- Chicago : indeed, no company controlled five hun- 
dred miles of road. One short line led to an- 
other, and so to another, perhaps with awkward gaps, and 




Courtesy of the Carnegie Steel Company. 
Forging a Railway Car Axle, at the Howard Axle Works, Homestead, Pa. 
The drop-hammer, about to strike upon the white-hot axle, weighs three and a 
half tons, and is one of fourteen such hammers in these works. 

certainly with annoying and costly transfers, and with con- 
fusing changes in rates and in schedules and sometimes in 
width of track. By 1880, the gaps had been filled, gauges 
unified, and small lines grouped into larger systems — - still 
counting, however, some 1500. By 1895, this number had 
been cut in half by further consolidation, and forty leading 
lines controlled half the mileage of the whole country. By 



AN ERA OF CONSOLIDATION 



585 



1905, all important lines were controlled by seven or eight 
groups of capitalists. 

A like consolidation of capital and management has 
been marked in nearly every sort of industry and com- 
merce. Between 1880 and 1890 the number of ^.n era of 
woolen mills decreased from 1990 to 1311, and consoUda- 
the manufactories of farm implements from 1943 
to 910 ; but in both lines the output was more than doubled. 




The Carrie Furnaces of the Carnegie Steel Company, among the most modern 
of blast furnaces. This view, showing part of the ore stock yard, is taken from 
the "charging" side. 



So, too, of iron and steel mills. The age of small individual 
enterprise had given way to an age of large combinations. 
Small stores merged into department stores ; small firms 
into large corporations ; large corporations into still larger 
"trusts." In the East, the making of "ready-made" cloth- 
ing became a mighty factory industry, and new leather-sew- 
ing machinery built up huge shoe-factories. In the West, 
the farmer's grain was no longer ground in a neighboring 



586 A BUSINESS AGE, 1876-1914 

mill on some small stream, but in great flour centers like 
Minneapolis ; and his beeves and hogs went, not to a vil- 
lage slaughter-house, but to the vast meat-packing indus- 
tries of Chicago. Even in agriculture this era of combination 
saw a new type of "bonanza farmers," each owning his 
thousands of rich acres in the Dakotas; and "cattle kings" 
seized on the immense feeding ranges of the Southwest. 

In connection with new scientific knowledge, such com- 
bination brought vast saving of wealth. The old village 
slaughter house threw away horns and hoofs and hair and 
intestines : the great packing-house works up all these — 
"everything except the squeal" — into articles of use. 
Pine stumps were found valuable for turpentine ; and the 
Southern cottonseed, formerly consigned to troublesome 
refuse heaps, was found highly valuable, first for fertilizing 
land, then for stock food, and finally for vegetable oils 
for human food. So, too, in countless other lines. 

On the other hand, every change from small to large 
organization carried with it the cruel ruin of countless small 
"capitalists" (who had owned their own "stores" or shops) 
and usually also a grievous upsetting of the life-plans of 
whole classes of laborers — all involving physical and mental 
distress, suicide, and crime. Masses of ruined families 
have paid for every gain to the world — ■ because society, 
which profits so splendidly from the changes, has never 
tried in earnest to learn how to insure its honest workers 
against such unfair loss. 

Unhappily, this material growth was accompanied, too, 
by an amazing growth of business immorality. This 
Business tendency, noticeable before the war, had been 
immorality strengthened by the flaunting success of corrupt 
army contractors, and was fostered for years afterward 
by the gambling spirit begotten of an unstable currency 
and of the spectacle of multitudes of fortunes made over- 
night in the oil wells of Pennsylvania or in the new 
mining regions of Nevada, Colorado, Idaho, and Montana. 
In later years, too, the tremendous power over credits 
possessed by railroad kings and by the heads of other 



BUSINESS IMMORALITY 



587 



great consolidations of capital has tempted them con- 
stantly from their true functions as "captains of industry" 
to play the part of buccaneers in the stock market ; and un- 
reasonable profits in the regular line of business draw the 
controlling stockholders in multitudes of corporations to 
increase their own shares by juggling the smaller holders 
out of theirs. 

Sometimes the controlling stockholders of a corporation 
turn its affairs over to an operating company — composed 









^'m & "- 




^^ V IP /*►. 


B • **' , 


■V 


m^ . 



Courtesy 0/ the Carnegie Steel Company 
Shearing off Steel Slabs. 



of themselves alone — which then absorbs all the profits 
of the whole business in salaries or in other ways provided 
in the contract which the raiders have made with themselves. 
Or leading members of a railway company organize an 
inside company — like an express company — to which 
then the legitimate profits of the first company are largely 
diverted in the shape of excessive rates on certain parts of 



588 A BUSINESS AGE, 1876-1914 

the railroad business. Only one degree worse is the de- 
Hberate wrecking of a prosperous corporation, by intentional 
mismanagement, so that the insiders may buy up the stock 
for a song, and then rejuvenate it — - to their huge profit. 
Step by step, the law has striven to cope with all such 
forms of robbery ; but numerous shrewd corporation 
lawyers find employment in steering "malefactors of great 
wealth" ^ through the devious channels of "high finance" 
so as to avoid grazing the letter of the law. 

One ruinous consequence of this lack of moral sense in 
business was a general indifference to the looting of the 
Looting public domain by business interests and favored 
the public individuals. Thus, the forests on the public 
domain lands, with decent care, would have supplied all 
immediate wants and still have remained unimpaired for 
future generations. But with criminal recklessness, the 
people permitted a few individuals not only to despoil the 
future of its due heritage, but even to engross to them- 
selves the vast immediate profits which properly belonged 
to present society as a whole. And, in their haste to grasp 
these huge profits, the big lumbermen wasted more than 
they pocketed, — taking only the best log perhaps out of 
three, and leaving the others to rot, or, along with the 
carelessly scattered slashings, to feed chance fires into irre- 
sistible conflagrations, which, it is estimated, have swept 
away at least a fourth of our forest wealth. Quaintly 
enough, this piteous spoliation and waste was excused and 
commended as "development of natural resources," and 
laws were made or twisted for its encouragement. 

Timber land, especially the pine forests of the Northwest, 
did not attract the genuine homesteader : too much labor 
was required to convert such lands into homes and farms, 
and the soil and distance from market were discouraging 
for agriculture. Such lands ought to have been withdrawn 
by the government from homestead entry. But, as the 
law was then administered, a man could "enter" a quarter 

^ A phrase of President Roosevelt's. 



AN EPIDEMIC OF PLUNDER 589 

section, clear a patch upon it, appear upon it for a night 
every few months, and so fulfill all legal requirements to 
complete title, — after which he had perfect right to sell 
the valuable timber, which had been his only motive in the 
transaction. Multitudes, less scrupulous about legal for- 
malities, sold the timber immediately after making entry, 
without ever "proving up" at all. 

These individual operations were trivial in amount; but 
the big lumber kings extended their effect by hiring hundreds 
and thousands of "dummy" homesteaders to secure title 
in this way to vast tracts of forest and to turn it over, for 
a song, to the enterprising employer. Nor, in early years, 
did any one see wrong in this process. Condemnation, 
none too severe, was reserved for the lumbermen who took 
shorter cuts by forging the entries or by using the same 
"dummies" many times over, in open defiance of the law. 
In ways similar, but varied as to details, the State lands, too, 
became the legalized booty of private citizens. 

This epidemic of waste and plunder had its golden age 
from 1870 to about 1890. Winston Churchill's In a Far 
Country and William Allen White's A Certain Rich Man 
are each a sort of "Pilgrim's Progress" allegory of American 
life in these decades, picturing its features, both good and 
bad, as no mere narrative can. Some thinkers, lacking in 
robust faith, despaired openly of democracy ; and the cou- 
rageous James Russell Lowell wrote sorrowfully of the 
degradation of the moral tone in America, — 

" I loved her old renown, her stainless fame. 
What better cause that I should loathe her shame ! " 

On the other hand, vigorous signs of new promise were 
not wanting. A passion for education possessed the people. 
The public high school was just taking full possession of its 
field. A new group of great teachers and organizers at 
new universities, — Andrew D. White at Cornell, James 
B. Angell at Michigan, Gilman at Johns Hopkins, Eliot 
at his reorganized Harvard, with their many fellows, — - 
were setting up higher ideals for American scholarship, and 



590 A BUSINESS AGE, 1876-1914 

connecting scholarship as never before with the daily life of 
the people. About 1890, such institutions began to send 
forth trained, devoted, vigorous young men to the service 
of the nation in its battle with corruption and with in- 
trenched privilege. Meantime, during the darkest years of 
material prosperity, some of the fine idealism of the Civil 
War period lived on — sometimes no doubt in blundering 
paths — in the movements of the Greenbackers and Prohi- 
bitionists and Grangers (below) to regenerate society. 



CHAPTER XXXVIII 

THE POLITICAL STORY, 1876-1896 

CIVIL SERVICE AND THE TARIFF 

Until the Roosevelt administration, the average re- 
spectable citizen knew little definitely about the corruption 
rampant in business and politics, and was usually 
inclined to dismiss all accusations as groundless, for civil 
One evil, however, was too spectacular to be ig- Service 
nored. In 1871 public opinion forced the un- 
willing Congress to pass an Act to rescue the Civil Service 
from the Spoils system. At first. President Grant seemed 
to favor the idea ; but in practice he let his friends among 
the spoilsmen thwart the law and drive from office the 
men who wished to administer it honestly (page 267). 
And in 1874 Congress refused to renew the small appro- 
priation for the work, — - trusting to public disgust at the 
breakdown of the reform. 

President Hayes was in earnest in the matter. His few 
removals from oflBce were mainly to get rid of spoilsmen — 
as when he dismissed Chester A. Arthur from the New York 
Collectorship of Customs — and he issued a notable " Civil 
Service order," quite in accord with the ideas of Jefferson 
and Gallatin, forbidding Federal employees to take part in 
political campaigns. This order, however, quickly became 
a dead letter. Post-office officials jeered at it ; and the 
nation had not yet learned that no reform was possible 
except on this basis. 

In 1880 the campaign was a struggle for office between 
the ins and outs to a degree unparalleled since 1824. Neither 
party took a stand on any live question. The The election 
Democrats railed at various Republican shames, °* i^®° 
but gave no assurance of doing better themselves. With a 

591 



592 "POLITICS" FROM 1876 TO 1898 

large part of the youth of the nation they were still dis- 
credited as "the party of disloyalty." The Republicans 
"pointed with pride" to their record as "the Grand Old 
Party that had saved the Union and freed the Slave," but 
they had no program for the future. Twenty years be- 
fore, the Republican party had been the party of the 
plain people, typified by Lincoln ; but during its long 
lease of power the desire for political favors had drawn 
to it all those selfish and corrupt influences which at first 
had opposed it. In the West two minor parties had ap- 
peared with real convictions, — - Prohibitionists and Green- 
backers, — but their numbers were insignificant. 

In the Republican Convention a desperate attempt was 
made to nominate ex-President Grant, but the tradition 
against a third term was too strong. Ballot after ballot 
he received from 302 to 312 votes ; but 379 were necessary, 
and the nomination finally went to a dark horse, — James A. 
Garfield. For the Vice Presidency the Convention named 
Chester A. Arthur, to rebuke Hayes' reform tendencies. 
The Massachusetts delegation presented a resolution favor- 
ing Civil Service Reform, but it was voted down over- 
whelmingly — a certain Flanagan, delegate from Texas, 
exclaiming indignantly, "What are we here for.^^" 

During the campaign every Federal officeholder received 
a letter from the Republican National Committee assessing 
a certain per cent of his salary for the Republican campaign 
fund. Ofiicials who neglected to pay these "voluntary con- 
tributions" were "reported" to the heads of their depart- 
ments for discipline. The vast public service, of two hun- 
dred thousand men, was turned into a machine to insure 
victory to the party in control. The practice had never 
before been followed up with such systematic shamelessness.^ 

Garfield was elected by a large electoral majority, but with 

* Such collections from officials were made an excuse by them for demanding 
higher salaries. As always, the people paid. The following contrast shows 
progress in outer decency, at least: in a recent campaign (1916) the Republican 
National Committee a.sked thou.sands of voters for subscriptions ; but the circular 
closed with the injunction, — "If you are a Federal officeholder, please disregard 
this request." 



THE STAR-ROUTE SCANDAL 593 

only some 10,000 votes more than his opponent in the 
country at large. The neiv President found a third of his 
time consumed by office-seekers. They "waylaid him when 
he ventured from the shelter of his home, and followed 
him even to the doors of the church where he worshipped." 
Four months after his inauguration he was murdered by a 
crazed applicant for office. 

Meantime, more scandal ! T. W. Brady, one of the 
highest officials in the postal service, had conspired with a 
group of contractors — including a United States ^^^ 
Senator — to cheat the government out of half star-route 
a million dollars a year. On certsim ''star routes,'' ^'^^^^^^ 
the legal compensation for carrying mail had been increased 
enormously by secret agreements for pretended services, and 
then the surplus had been divided between the contractors 
and the officials. When investigation began, Brady de- 
manded that Garfield call it off. Not gaining this favor, 
he published a letter written by Garfield during the cam- 
paign, showing that he (Garfield) had urged the collection 
of campaign funds from officials. On the other hand, Presi- 
dent Arthur surprised the reform element by his good 
sense and firmness, by the cordial support he gave to Civil 
Service Reform, and by the faithfulness with which he 
pressed the trial of the star-route thieves. 

Those trials were spectacular. Important newspapers 
impudently whitewashed the criminals ; and insolent boasts 
were made freely that no jury would convict such "high 
and influential men." Through technicalities and delays, 
the bigger criminals did all escape. 

These events focused attention again on the need of civil 
service reform. Congress, however, remained deaf in the 
session of 1881-1882 ; and, in the congressional victory for 
elections of 1882, another assessment letter to CivU Service 
Federal officials was signed by three leading Re- '^"°"° 
publican statesmen. Popular indignation at these offenses 
made itself felt in the elections, and the next session of the 
chastened Congress promptly passed the Civil Service Act 
(January, 1883), providing that vacancies in certain classes 



594 



"POLITICS" FROM 1876 TO 1898 



of offices should be filled in future from applicants whose 
fitness had been tested by competitive examination, and 
that such appointments should be revoked afterward only 
"for cause." A Civil Service Commission, also, to oversee 
the workings of the law, was established. The law did 
not apply to heads of large offices, or to any office where the 
President's nomination requires confirmation by the Senate ; 
and it was left to the President to classify from time to 
time the offices to be protected. President Arthur at once 
placed some 14,000 positions under the operation of the law. 



For nearly twenty years, Mr. Blaine had been the idol 
of the Republican masses, and in 1884 he at last won the 
Blaine and nomination for the Presidency — despite earnest 
Cleveland Opposition from a large "reform" element led by 
in 1884 veterans like Carl Schurz, Andrew D. White, and 
George William Curtis, editor of Harper's Weekly, and by 
ardent young men like Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachu- 
setts and Theodore Roosevelt of New York. The reformers 
took their defeat in various ways. Lodge swallowed his 
chagrin and supported the ticket. Roosevelt went west, 
to begin his ranch life in Dakota. The greater number be- 
came "Mugwumps," and supported Grover Cleveland, the 
Democratic candidate. 

Cleveland had attracted attention as governor of New 
York by his stubborn honesty and his fearless attitude 
Cleveland toward the corrupt Tammany machine. His 
and the friends jubilantly shouted the slogan, — "We love 
IV ervice j^j^^ ^^^ ^j^^ enemies he has made"; and he was 
elected as a reform President, with the civil service issue 
in the foreground. But the great body of Democratic poli- 
ticians were secretly or actively hostile to civil service re- 
form ; and the President's position was more difficult even 
than Jefferson's had been three generations before. In 
spite of the recent law, every Federal official was still a 
Republican. The democratic office seekers were ravening 
from their quarter-century fast; and their pressure upon 
the head of their party for at least a share in the public 



THE TARIFF 595 

service was overwhelming. With all his unquestioned 
sincerity and firmness, the President gave ground before 
this spoils spirit far enough to drive many Mugwumps, in 
disgust, back to the Republicans. Still, the administration 
marks a notable advance for a non-partisan service. It 
definitely established the principle of Hayes' Civil Service 
order against "offensive partisanship" by oflBcials, prevented 
political assessments, and doubled the "classified" list. 

When Cleveland became President, the war tariffs were 
still in force. By the trend of history, too, high protection 
had become associated in the thought of the North Cleveland 
with the preservation of the Union and the free- and the 
ing of the slave ; and the special interests, thriv- " 
ing on protection, knew how to take shrewd advantage of 
this habit of thought among the people. 

With dogged persistence, Cleveland strove to lead the 
Democratic party to take up tariff reduction. In message 
after message, he called attention to the dangerous piling 
up of the surplus from the needless revenue ; to the con- 
sequent opportunities for extravagance and corruption in 
expenditure ; and especially to the unjust burdens upon the 
poorer classes of society from tariff taxation. In December, 
1887, his message was given up wholly to this one topic, 
denouncing the existing tariff fiercely as "vicious" and "in- 
equitable." During the following summer, by such argu- 
ment, and by a despotic use of the President's power of 
"patronage," the House was spurred into passing a reform 
"Mills bill," ^ placing a few important articles on the free 
list and reducing the average tax from 47 per cent to 40 ; 
but this measure failed in the Republican Senate. 

In the "educational campaign" of 1888, for the first time 
for almost sixty years, the tariff was the leading issue before 
the people. Blaine had replied to Cleveland's ^^^^j ^j^^ 
epoch-making message of '87 by a striking "inter- election 
view," cabled from Paris, setting up protection ° 
as the desirable permanent policy. The Republican party 

^ Roger Q. Mills of Texas was the chief author of the measure. 



596 POLITICS" FROM 1876 TO 1898 

rallied to this standard. Its platform declared for reduc- 
tion of internal taxes (on whisky), in order to remove op- 
portunity to reduce tariff income. Orators like William 
McKinley represented tariff reduction as "unpatriotic" and 
"inspired by our foreign rivals," and defended the cheapen- 
ing of alcoholic drinks by urging that "taxation is not 
designed as a means of grace." Even the Republicans of 
the Northwest, where Republican conventions in State 
after State had been calling for reform, were whipped into 
line by the plea that the tariff, if revised at all, should at 
least be revised "by its friends." 

The debate was marked by a notable shift of ground on 
the part of protectionists. Clay and the earlier protec- 
tionists advocated protection for "infant industries," as a 
temporary policy. This argument hardly applied now that 
those industries had become dominating influences in the 
country. Greeley, in the forties and fifties, had modified 
it into a plea for protection to higher wages for American 
workingmen compared with European laborers (page 476). 
This now became the general argument. It failed, however, 
to take account of the higher cost of living because of the 
tariff; nor was evidence submitted to show that the pro- 
tected industries really paid higher wages in return for their 
tariff privileges. 

The Republican manager, Matthew Quay, Senator from 
Pennsylvania, was a noted spoilsman, and had been publicly 
accused in Congress, without denial on his part, of having 
stolen $260,000 from the treasury of Pennsylvania while an 
officer of that State. He now called on "protected" manu- 
facturers for huge contributions to the Republican funds, ^ 
and, according to general belief, spent money more freely 
than ever before in buying votes in doubtful States. One 
scandal, made public a little later, was long remembered. 
A member of the Republican National Committee wrote to 
political lieutenants in Indiana, on which State it was 
thought the election would turn, — ^ "Divide the 'floaters' 

1 This and other evil features of the political campaigns of this era are pre- 
sented in Blythe's striking political novel, A Western Warwick. 



THE TARIFF 597 

into blocks of five, and put a trusted man with the necessary 
funds in charge of each five, and make him responsible that 
none get away and that all vote our ticket." 

With the secret aid of the Democratic Tammany machine 
in New York, the Republicans elected Benjamin Harrison, 
though he had 100,000 fewer votes than Cleveland. An orgy 
The Republican platform had promised an exten- °^ ^^°^^ 
sion of civil service reform ; but for months after the victory, 
the spoils system was rampant. Clarkson, the Assistant 
Postmaster-General, earned the title of "the Headsman," 
by gleefully decapitating 30,000 postmasters in the first year ; 
and, amid the applause of the Senate, Ingalls of Kansas de- 
clared, — "The purification of politics is an iridescent 
dream ; the Decalogue and the Golden Rule have no 'place in 
a political campaign.''' This attitude of prominent spoilsmen 
was rebuked, however, by the people in the Congressional 
elections of 1890, and President Harrison appointed to the 
Civil Service Commission Theodore Roosevelt of New 
York. This fearless young reformer at once injected new 
energy into the administration of the law, and rallied a 
fresh enthusiasm among the people to its support by his 
vigorous use of language. Hitherto, the spoilsmen had 
reviled the mild-mannered gentlemen of the Commission 
at will : Roosevelt gave back epithet for epithet, with 
interest, — as when he affirmed that a great part of the 
political contributions extorted from reluctant officials was 
"retained by the jackals who collected it." 

The Republicans called their victory "a mandate for 
protection," and the McKinley Tariff of 1890 raised rates 
even above the war standard. The committee in _ 

The 

charge of the framing of the bill held "public McKinley 
hearings," at which any one interested might ^^"^ 
appear, to present his needs and views. In prac- 
tice, this resulted in hearing at great length the claims of 
the scores of great manufacturers, but hardly at all the 
claims of the millions of small consumers. Thus the 
Binding Twine trust secured the power to tax every sheaf 
of the farmer's grain, by a tariff on twine, in spite of earnest 



598 "POLITICS" FROM 1876 TO 1898 

but less organized opposition by the farmers of the country. 
"Special interests" shaped the law, as Randolph had 
warned the nation a century before. 

A novel feature of the bill was its ^'reciprocity'' provisions. 
Foreign countries, incensed at our exclusion of their products, 
were threatening retaliatory tariffs on American food- 
stuffs ; and even Blaine had criticized the bill sharply, in its 
original form, on the ground that it failed to "open the 
market to another bushel of grain or another barrel of pork." 
Finally, it was arranged that the President might provide 
by treaty for the free admission of raw sugar, coffee, molasses, 
and hides, from any country which would admit free our 
products. Some treaties of this nature were afterward 
negotiated with Central and South American countries. 

An immediate rise in prices on manufactures ^ made the 
new tariff highly unpopular, and the congressional elections 
of 1890 witnessed a "landslide" for the Democrats. Various 
House bills for tariff reduction, however, were buried in the 
hold-over Senate ; and the surplus in the Treasury had now 
been dissipated by a huge increase in pensions for the 
veterans of the Civil War, 

Cleveland's first administration had witnessed a savage 
raid on the Treasury in the form of thousands of special 
Pensions pension bills. Many of these applied to merito- 
and the rious cases which even the generous provisions of 
surp us ^j^^ general law did not reach ; but hundreds of 

others were gross frauds, which, in many cases, had already 
been exposed by the regular pension bureau. Cleveland 
vetoed 233 private pension bills.- Then Harrison's admin- 
istration saw the pension rolls doubled by a new general law, 

^ The rise reached many forms of foodstuffs. Thus canned goods were raised 
because the canners had to pay more for highly protected tin plate. 

^ In other respects, also, Cleveland gave a new vigor to the veto power. 
President Johnson, in his Reconstruction quarrel with Congress, vetoed 21 bills, 
— many more than any predecessor, — though several of these vetoes were over- 
ridden. Grant used the veto 43 times in his two terms. Up to Cleveland's 
accession, there had been in all only 1,32 Presidential vetoes. In his first term 
Cleveland used the power 301 times. Cf. page 458. 



A BROKEN BARGAIN 599 

with an increase of annual expenditure for this purpose from 
88 millions to 159 millions. The same four years (1889- 
1893) saw the yearly expenditure for the navy mount from 
17 to 33 millions. The Fifty-first Congress was the first 
"Billion-Dollar Congress" — but little of the increase in 
appropriations went to anything but war past or future. 

The rebound against the McKinley Tariff elected Cleve- 
land again in 1892. The Democratic platform had declared 
frankly for a tariff "for revenue only." During Election 
the campaign, however, the leaders felt impelled °^ ^^^^ 
to promise that reductions from existing rates should be made 
gradually, so as to permit business to readjust itself safely. 
Moreover, tariff reform was now hampered by currency ques- 
tions, which had thrust themselves into the foreground 
(page 604 ff.). A "Wilson Bill" did pass the House in form 
fairly satisfactory to tariff reformers ; but in the 
Senate, where the Democrats had a bare majority ■ wiison 
anyway, several members deserted in order '^^"^ 
to secure protection for interests which they 
represented (sugar in Louisiana, iron in West Virginia and 
Alabama, and so on), and amended the bill into what 
President Cleveland called bluntly a measure of "party 
perfidy." A Congressional investigation revealed also the 
disgraceful fact that prominent senators had been buying 
stocks whose value would be raised by their votes for pro- 
tection. Still Cleveland felt constrained to let the bill 
become law — as the best thing attainable. It reduced 
the average of the duties from 49 to 40 per cent ; and it was 
accompanied by a sop to the radicals in the shape of a. 
tax of tiDo per cent on all incomes over $1^000. 

But this compensaiion to the poorer classes was at once 
nullified. The Supreme Court declared the income tax 
unconstitutional, on the ground that it was a 
direct tax but not apportioned as the Constitu- supreme 
tion orders for direct taxes (Art. I. sec. 2). Court 
During the War, precisely such a tax had been f^comeMx^ 
in force, and in 1875 the Court had decided 
unanimously that it was constitutional. In this like case, 



600 "POLITICS" FROM 1876 TO 1898 

twenty years later, the Court at first divided equally, four 
to four. Public feeling was intense. The conservative 
moneyed classes were represented before the Court by the 
great lawyer, Rufus Choate, who declared that such a tax 
would "scatter to the winds the very keystone of civilization 
— the rights of private property." On the recovery of a 
sick Justice, the case was heard again. The Justice before 
absent now voted for the tax ; but Justice Shiras, who had 
before voted for it, now changed to the opposition. Con- 
servatives exulted loudly. Said the New York Sun, "The 
wave of socialistic revolution has gone far, but it breaks 
at the foot of the ultimate bulwark set up for the protection 
of our liberties. Five to four, the Court stands like a 
rock." On the other hand the stern disappointment of the 
reform elements was voiced by Justice Harlan in an able 
dissenting opinion which was marked by unusual emotion 
and which let it be seen that the Justice felt that the great 
Court had struck a cruel blow at American institutions. 
The modern verdict upon the decision, and upon its effect 
on society, is expressed well by Professor Davis Rich Dewey : 
"Interest in the tax itself was lost sight of in the reve- 
lation of fickleness and uncertainty in the highest court of 
the land." It was particularly unfortunate that such 
shiftiness should have operated as a protection to the wealthy 
classes only. 

The election of 1896 was won by the Republicans on the 
issue of "sound money" (page 608) ; but President McKinley 
The Dingiey claimed the victory as a mandate to renew the high 
Tariff, 1897 protection policy with which he had personally 
identified himself. Accordingly, a special session of Congress 
enacted the Dingiey Tariff, raising the average rate to 57 per 
cent. The bill did provide, it is true, that, during the two 
years following, the President might make treaties with for- 
eign countries, abating a fifth of the Dingiey rates in return 
for concessions to American commerce ; and the Republican 
masses were led to look upon the exorbitant rates mainly 
as a club to force reciprocity. President McKinley, from 
time to time, submitted seven such treaties to the Senate, but 



THE TARIFF 601 

that body, with an extreme of bad faith, hearkening only 
to the special interests which controlled the seats or fortunes 
of many members, failed to ratify. As with the And " reci- 
preceding tariff, the bargain by which high rates procity " 
had been secured was broken ; and again the loss fell upon 
the poor. 

Wherever the tariff did shield a raw material from foreign 
competition (as with wool), it gave a correspondingly 
higher protection to the manufacturer who was to use that 
material. Thus the wearer of woolen goods paid a double 
tax, — one to the wool grower, and another to the manu- 
facturer. But, as a rule, those items which had been added 
to the bill with a pretense of protecting the farmers proved 
again deceptive. A duty was placed on hides ; but the 
advantage was monopolized by the packing houses. The 
cattle raiser got none of it. He had to sell, as before, to 
the trust at its own price ; but the trust could now make the 
shoe manufacturer pay more for leather. And the only 
noticeable result to the cattle raiser — and to every other 
"ultimate consumer" — was a higher price for shoes and 
harness. Critics pointed out, too, that the prohibitive 
duties on many foreign imports made it easier for monopo- 
listic combinations to control prices and output. The 
years following the enactment of the Dingley Tariff were 
just the years of most rapid development of such monopolies. 
*' The tariff is the inother of the trusts" became a popular cry. 

Manufactures, of course, were tremendously stimulated. 
They now used most of the raw material produced in 
America. American mills forged their way into 
the markets of the world, and underbid English perity^" 
and German manufacturers in Russia, India, and the 
China, and Australia. American machinery even ^^j^" 
invaded France and England. To do this, the 
American manufacturer sold his goods cheaper abroad 
than at home, and, in part, was enabled to undersell the 
foreign manufacturer abroad by means of the unreasonable 
profits wrung from the American consumer. 

For a time the country was entranced by the appearance 



602 "POLITICS" FROM 1876 TO 1898 

of "prosperity." But gradually the idea gained ground 
that this was a manufacturer's prosperity, paid for by the 
consumer. The cost of living rose so rapidly as to become a 
byword. Between 1896 and 1904 it was computed to have 
increased a fourth.^ This amounted, of course, to a savage 
cut in real wages and in all fixed incomes, and it rapidly 
created a serious problem for people of small means, to be 
tremendously augmented soon by the more rapid rise after 
the World War. 

^ The conservative figures of the Bureau of Labor place the increase in the 
period 1890-1909 at 26| per cent. Of course the tariff was only one of several 
factors in the rise of prices. Another factor was the increased volume of gold — 
in which prices are measured (page 619). But this last factor operated all over 
the world, — in England, presumably, as strongly as in America. The rise of 
prices in England, however, down to the beginning of the European War in 1914, 
was only about a third of. that in the United States. 



CHAPTER XXXIX 

ANOTHER PHASE OF THE POLITICAL STORY 

GREENBACKS AND FREE SILVER 

For thirteen years after the Civil War, the "Treasury 
notes" and the National bank notes were the only money 
in circulation. The government redeemed part .. 
of this "War currency" — by issuing new bonds backs" 
in exchange for it — but gold did not come out of *^*®'" ***® 
hiding. This paper money remained below par, 
usually at about 80 cents, and its value fluctuated some- 
what, as Wall Street speculators forced gold up or down. 
In the summer of 1869 Jay Gould and "Jim" Fiske made 
an extreme attempt to "corner" gold, and on a certain 
"Black Friday" they drove its price up to 162. "Black 
In other words, a dollar of paper money was driven ^''"day " 
down in value to 61 cents, and business .everywhere was tot- 
tering to bankruptcy. Gould and Fiske had tried zealously 
to cultivate intimacy with President Grant and to woo him 
to their plans ; but now, with the President's approval, the 
Secretary of the Treasury saved the business of the country, 
and crushed the Wall Street pirates, by throwing upon the 
market many millions of the government's gold reserve. 

The government paid the interest on all its bonds in gold. 
This policy was necessary to preserve the nation's credit, 
but it had a repulsive side. The man who earned fifty 
dollars in the field, or who received that amount as interest 
on a small loan, had to take his pay at its face in paper ; 
but the wealthy holder of a government bond, to whom 
fifty dollars of interest was due, could exchange his gold for 
sixty or seventy dollars in paper. Another kind of wrong 
was still more serious. In war time, paper money was 
worth perhaps fifty cents on a dollar. If a farmer then 

603 



604 "POLITICS" FROM 1876 TO 1898 

mortgaged his two thousand dollar farm for half its value, 
he received $1000 in greenbacks (or $500 in gold). Now, 
as paper appreciated, approaching par, and prices fell, 
the farmer's debt was doubled by the juggling tricks of a 
varying currency. 

Many men who saw the abuse jumped at a deceptive 
remedy. The Democratic platform of 1868 called for "one 
currency for the producer and the bond holder," and urged 
that the government should pay its interest in greenbacks 
except when the bond specified gold. Local "Greenback" 
parties went further, demanding "fiat money" as a perma- 
nent policy. In 1876 the Greenback organization became 
national, with a candidate for the Presidency ; and two 
years later, it cast a million votes. 

But meantime the Republican party stood victoriously for 
the "resumption of specie payment." Congress provided 
"Resump- ^^^ *^^ accumulation of a gold reserve for that 
tion " in purpose, and, January 1, 1879, the Treasury an- 
^^^® nounced its readiness to exchange gold for its 

greenbacks. Paper money rose at once to par — "as good 
as gold." A third of a billion remained in circulation; but 
ever since then the notes have been redeemable on demand. 

The paper-money question belonged to the Reconstruction 
period. From 1890 to about 1900 another "cheap money" 
" Free agitation cast all other issues into the background, 

silver" This was an unfortunate demand for "free silver," 

Until 1873 any one could present gold or silver bullion at any 
government mint and receive back the value in" coin. For 
forty years the law had fixed the "ratio" between the two 
metals as "16 to 1." At the beginning of that period, and 
for long before, an ounce of gold was worth sixteen ounces 
of silver for commercial purposes ; and so the silver dollar 
was made sixteen times as heavy as the gold dollar. After 
1850, the gold discoveries in California cheapened the value 
of gold ; and the little silver that was mined between that 
time and 1870 could be used more profitably in the arts 
than at the mint, so that very little silver was coined. 



\ 



" GREENBACKS •' AND "FREE SILVER" 605 

In 1870 the market ratio of the metals was 15.57. A 
silver dollar would have been worth $1.03, and they had all 
been melted down for this profit. 

But, about 1870, new silver mines in Nevada and Colorado 
began to flood the markets with silver. Then, in 1873, 
Congress "demonetized" silver, — ceasing to authorize its 
coinage, except in small quantities for the oriental trade, 
and refusing legal-tender character at home to these "trade 
dollars." At the same time, European countries began to 
abandon "bimetalism" for a gold standard. The increased 
output of silver, together with this decreased demand for it, 
forced down its value rapidly. By 1876, the ratio of silver 
to gold had fallen to 17.87 ; and by 1893 to 28.25, so that a 
silver "dollar" of the old weight was worth only 56 cents in 
gold ; but the silver mine owners called vociferously for coin- 
age at the old rate. Moreover, the farmers of the West and 
many ardent reformers were persuaded that the "crime of 
'73" had been manipulated by the money monopolists of 
Wall Street to reduce the volume of the currency, and so 
enhance the value of their wealth. The more thoughtful 
advocates of silver believed that its unlimited coinage by 
the United States would restore silver to its old market 
value because of the increased demand ; but the larger 
body of its supporters were animated by the crude fallacies 
of fiat money, such as had inspired the Greenback party. 

It was quite true that there was not enough gold coined 
to make a proper basis for the growing business of the 
country. Consequently, money was appreciating in value, 
and prices depreciating. Creditors profited ; debtors, like 
farmers with mortgages to meet, suffered. All reformers 
saw these evils. Some magnified them unduly, and caught 
impulsively at the proffered remedy of making silver a 
legal tender at the old rate. Their real problem was to 
curb the growth of special privilege in business and of 
corruption in politics, but they turned aside for a mis- 
leading economic doctrine. More logical reformers felt 
that a depreciation of the coinage would entail all the dis- 



606 "POLITICS" FROM 1876 TO 1898 

asters of cheap money and bring in evils worse than those 
to be cured. This unhappy division seriously delayed the 
reform of fundamental troubles in American life. 

Both Republicans and Democrats shirked a positive 
position as to silver. Accordingly, in the West and South 
jjjg there sprang up the new Populist party, with a 

Populist platform calling for the unlimited coinage of sil- 
^^^^ ver at 16 to 1, for a graduated income tax, postal 

savings banks, the "Australian ballot," direct election of 
United States Senators, an eight-hour day, government guar- 
antee of bank deposits, and government ownership of rail- 
roads and of other natural monopolies. To the East all this 
seemed wild-eyed anarchism. But in the Presidential elec- 
tion of 1892, General James B. Weaver, the Populist candi- 
date, secured 22 electors, with more than a million votes, to 
about five and a half millions to each of the main parties. 
Two years earlier, the party had captured several State gov- 
ernments in the West and South, and had sent forty 
representatives to Congress. 

This Populist success induced Congress, in 1890, to pass 
'Hhe Sherman Act,'" ordering a slight increase in silver coin- 
age. The increase in demand raised silver for a time ; but 
in 1893 the British government demonetized that metal 
in India, and it shrank to a lower point than ever before. 
Gold now was exported with a rush, and that remaining in 
the country was hoarded. 

A periodic crisis, due once more to over-investment on 
credit, seems to have been about due ; and it was hastened 
The crisis by widespread distrust of the currency and by un- 
of 1893 certainty as to future action by Congress. In 1893 

the crash came. Creditors began to insist on payments in 
gold. Nearly six hundred banks closed their doors, and more 
than fifteen thousand firms went to the wall, with losses 
amounting to a third of a billion. Industry was prostrated 
as at no previous panic. Farmers lost their homes, and the 
improvements of years, on small mortgages. Cities were 
thronged with hundreds of thousands of unemployed and 



"GREENBACKS ' AND "FREE SILVER" 607 

desperate men. Every large place had its free "soup 
kitchen," and many towns, for the first time in America, 
opened "relief works," to provide the starving Cleveland 
with employment. And, in this crisis, President and the 
Cleveland had to increase the National debt ^"'^'^i^sue 
heavily by selling bonds, in order to maintain the essential 
gold reserve in the treasury. 

The law which had brought about Resumption in 1879 had 
very properly made it the duty of the President to maintain a gold 
reserve in the Treasury sufficient to meet any paper money pre- 
sented for redemption. Now, in a few months, nearly half the 
reserve was drawn out (down to 68 millions) by Treasury notes 
so presented, while the panic had cut down the government's 
revenues, so that no funds were available with which to buy gold. 
Thus President Cleveland had to increase the National debt by 
selling bonds. The banks paid gold for these bonds ; but, owing 
to the clumsy confusion of our currency laws, they drew most 
of this gold out of the Treasury, just beforehand, by presenting 
Treasury notes there. "What was poured in through the funnel 
was first drawn out through the bunghole." By a quaintly 
vicious feature of the law, too, the Treasury notes had to 
be at once reissued. Thus, when the government had again to 
sell bonds, the same process could be repeated with the same 
currency, — in the dizziest of circles, — so that to maintain a 
balance of a few millions of gold the President had to sell 264 
millions in bonds. To lessen the evil, he called the Wall Street 
bankers into conference, to pledge them to take the bonds without 
withdrawing the gold to do it with; but he was at once accused 
by the Radicals of granting the money power unreasonable 
secret privileges. 

The campaign of 1896 (page 600) was a crisis in American 
history. President Cleveland had alienated the radical wing 
of the Democratic party by uncompromising hos- The election 
tility to silver legislation,^ and the party split on °^ ^^®® 
that issue. The National Convention afforded a dramatic 

^ It is, perhaps, fairer to say that this attitude seemed to the Radicals one 
more proof of Cleveland's alliance with the "Money Power," seen also, as it 
appeared to them, in his policy in the Chicago strike (page 649). Cleveland was a 
plodding, patient man of rugged honesty, and, for his day, he was a progressive 



608 "POLITICS" FROM 1876 TO 1898 

scene. William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska, a young man 
hardly known in the East, swept the great assembly re- 
sistlessly by an impassioned speech of splendid 
WDUam oratory and deep sincerity. The contest between 
Jennings silver and gold he pictured as a contest of wealth 
against industry. The gold men had made much 
of what they called the business interests. But, said 
Bryan, "the farmer who goes forth in the morning and toils 
all day, and, by applying brain and muscle to natural 
resources, creates wealth, is as much a business man as is 
the man who goes upon the Board of Trade and bets on the 
price of grain." Turning to the "gold" delegates, he ex- 
claimed, "You shall not press down upon the brow of labor 
this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon 
this cross of gold." 

With tremendous enthusiasm, the Convention declared, 
two to one, for the "unlimited coinage of both silver and 
gold at the ratio of sixteen to one," and nominated Bryan 
for the presidency. To men of conservative tendencies 
and associations, the new leader seemed a demagogue. 
The Democratic Louisville Courier-Journal denounced him 
as a "dishonest dodger," a "daring adventurer," a "political 
faker"; and the New York Tribune reviled him as "a 
willing puppet in the blood-imbrued hands of revolutionists, 
— apt at lies and forgeries and blasphemies, the rival of 
Benedict Arnold and Jefferson Davis in treason to the 
Republic" ! A strong faction of the Democratic party took 
the name of "Gold Democrats" and nominated a ticket of 
their own. The Republicans nominated William McKinley 
on a "sound money" platform. 

The Democratic campaign was hampered by lack of 

statesman, deserving of more recognition from radical reformers than he received. 
In his final message to Congress, after his defeat had put him "out of politics," he 
warned the nation that great fortunes were no longer the result solely of sturdy 
industry and enlightened foresight, but largely of the " dincn'minating farnr of the 
government" and of "undue exactions from the masses of our people." After leav- 
ing the Presidency, his ser\nces as a lawyer were sought by great corporations, but 
he always refused their retainers. No other president from Lincoln to Roosevelt 
did so much to arouse a progressive movement in this nation. 



"GREENBACKS" AND "FREE SILVER" 609 

money ; but the most was made of Mr. Bryan's oratory. 
Candidates had previously taken small part in campaigning. 
Mr. Bryan traveled eighteen thousand miles and spoke 
to vast numbers of people. The Republican coffers were 
supplied lavishly by the moneyed interests of the country ; 
and the campaign was managed by Mark Hanna, a typical 
representative of the "big business" interests, — a virile 
and very likeable character, who honestly believed that the 
government ought to be "an adjunct of business," and who, 
his admirers confessed, got what he went after in politics 
without scrupulous regard to means. Workingmen were 
intimidated by posted notices that the factories would 
close if the Democrats won ; and many great business 
concerns placed orders with manufacturers with a provision 
for cancellation if Bryan were elected. This fear of busi- 
ness catastrophe (a fear largely manufactured) was a chief 
factor in the Republican success. But as Cleveland had 
committed the Democratic party to tariff reform, so Bryan 
had now committed it for a time to the cause of the masses 
against the ''special interests'^ and '' privileged'^ capital. 
Failing to make him out a villain, the conservatives tried 
now for awhile to take him as a jest ; but all men had soon 
to recognize that a new force had come into American life. 

At this point came an interruption to normal development, 
— the Spanish Wat and the question of imperialism. 



CHAPTER XL 

AMERICA A WORLD POWER 

For some time our growing commercial interests had in- 
spired a more aggressive foreign policy. Three notable 
incidents in this line preceded the war with Spain. 

1. In Harrison's administration the energetic Blaine was 
Secretary of State. A cardinal point in his policy was to ex- 
tend the influence of the United States over 

Pan- 
American Spanish America. In 1889 he brought together 

Congress ^^ Washington a notable Pan-A7nerican Congress 
which furthered commercial reciprocity and ex- 
pressed a desire for standing treaties of arbitration between 
all American nations. 

2. For fifty years, the United States had held close 
relations with Hawaii. The islands had accepted Christian- 
The revo- ^^^ from American missionaries ; and American 
lution in planters and merchants were the chief element in a 

*^^ considerable White population. American capital, 

too, was largely interested in sugar raising in the islands. 
The native government, under the influence of English and 
American ideas, had been brought to the form of a constitu- 
tional monarchy. In January, 1893, a revolution deposed the 
native queen and set up a provisional republic. The leading 
spirits of the new government were Americans, and they 
asked for annexation to the United States. To support this 
revolution, the United States minister to the old government 
ran up the United States flag, virtually declared a protec- 
torate, and secured a force of marines from an American 
vessel in the harbor to overawe the natives. 

In his remaining weeks of oflBce, President Harrison tried 
to hurry through a treaty of annexation ; but Cleveland, 
on his accession, withdrew the treaty from the Senate, and 

tilU 



THE VENEZUELA ARBITRATION 611 

sent a special commissioner to the islands to investigate. 
The report revealed the revolution as a conspiracy, in which 
the American minister had taken a leading part to over- 
throw the government to which he was accredited ; and the 
provisional republic, it was shown, was supported by only a 
small fraction of the population. Cleveland attempted to 
undo this "flagrant wrong" to a weak state. Despite the 
violent outcry of opposition papers, he "hauled down the 
American flag." Skillfully intrenched in possession by 
this time, however, the republican government maintained 
itself, unstably, against the native dynasty. 

3. For half a century an obscure dispute had dragged 
along as to the boundary between Venezuela and British 
Guiana. In the eighties gold was discovered, and ^j^^ 
English miners began to crowd into the disputed Venezuela 
wilderness. By 1895 the quarrel was acute. The "*'"''^«°° 
English government made it clear to Venezuela that it 
intended to occupy the territory. Venezuela had already 
appealed to the United States for protection ; and now our 
government insisted vigorously that England submit the 
matter to arbitration. Lord Salisbury, the English prime 
minister, declined. Then President Cleveland electrified the 
world by a message to Congress (December 17, 1895), 
recommending the creation of an American commission to 
determine the true boundary, and pointing out that war 
must follow if England should refuse to accept its award. 
Then England awoke to the fact that a serious quarrel was 
in progress. People, press, and public men made clear a 
warm friendship for the United States wholly unsuspected 
by the mass of Americans,' and it was immediately evident 
that even the irritating tone of American diplomacy could 
not arouse a war feeling. War with the United States 
on such an issue, said Lord Rosebery, the Liberal leader, 
"would be the greatest crime on record"; and the Con- 
servative leader in parliament, Mr. Balfour, added that 

* This aspect of the affair was made more prominent by a remarkable display a 
few weeks later of war feeling in England against Germany. 



612 AMERICA BECOMES A WORLD POWER 

such a contest would be invested "with the unnatural 
horrors of civil war." The ministry now offered to accept 
arbitration, suggesting, however, an international com- 
mission, in place of one appointed by our government alone, 
and the matter was so arranged. The commission reported 
in 1899, favoring the English contention for the most part, 
— a result perfectly satisfactory to the United States. 

The English ministry now proposed to the United States 
a standing treaty for arbitration of future disputes between 
the two countries. The treaty was drawn up, and was 
strongly urged upon the Senate by President Cleveland and 
later by President McKinley. But the Senate, now in a 
period of degradation, preferred to play politics, and refused 
to ratify this proposal for an advance in world peace. 

Then came the Spanish-American War. After 1824, 
only Cuba and Porto Rico were left to Spain of her once 
The Cuban wide-lying American empire. In Cuba, revolt 
revolution ^r^g chronic. Taxation was exorbitant ; trade 
was shackled, in Spanish interests ; and the natives were 
despised by Spanish officials. In 1895 the island was once 
more ablaze with revolt, — organized in great measure by 
a Cuban Junta in the United States and aided materially 
by filibustering expeditions from our shores. On both sides 
the war was barbarous. In particular, the cruel policy 
of the Spanish commander, Weyler, caused deadly suflPering 
to women and children, gathered into reconcentrado camps 
without proper care or food. The "Gem of the Antilles" 
was rapidly turning to a desert and a graveyard. 

American capitalists had large interests in the sugar in- 
dustry in the island, and used powerful influences, open and 
secret, to secure American intervention, with a view to 
subsequent annexation by Congress. Such forces played 
skillfully upon the humanitarian sympathies of the American 
people, and on our habitual inclination to aid any movement 
on this continent for political independence. In 1897 the 
country was seething with discontent at the continuance 
of Spanish rule in Cuba, and Congress was eager for war; 



ROOSEVELT'S ROUGH RIDERS 613 

but for some months more President McKinley held such 
impulses in check while he tried to secure satisfactory con- 
cessions to Cuba from Spain. 

A new Spanish ministry, led by the Liberal Sagasta, 
did recall Weyler, placed the war upon a "civilized" foot- 
ing, and offered the Cubans generous concessions ; .. Remem- 
but a new situation hurried America into the war. ber the 
February 15, 1898, the American battleship Maine, ^*'°^ " 
visiting in Havana harbor, was blown up, with the loss of 
260 of her men. The explosion may have come from a subma- 
rine mine operated by Cubans to produce the results which 
followed, or the mine may possibly have been operated by a 
few Spanish officers. No one now seriously believes that 
the Spanish government was responsible. At the moment, 
however, this was the almost universal assumption ; and a 
vengeful cry for blood — Remember the Maine — reinforced 
irresistibly the previous call for American interference. 
Congress gave a solemn pledge that the United States would 
not hold Cuba for herself ; and the American forces soon 
completed the task of expelling Spain. 

A picturesque feature of the brief four months' struggle 
was the dashing career of the "Rough Riders." Officially, 
this force was the "First Volunteer Regiment Roosevelt's 
of Cavalry." It was raised by Theodore Roose- "Rough 
velt, largely from his old associates among ranchers ' ^^^ 
and cowboys in the West, with a sprinkling of Eastern 
football stars. Roosevelt resigned as Assistant Secretary 
of the Navy to become Lieutenant Colonel of this regi- 
ment. The decisive land-battle of the war was fought 
stubbornly along the paths of a tropical jungle near the 
city of Santiago, July 1, 2, and 3. Roosevelt marched his 
troops all night, June 30, to be in at the fight, and 
led them gallantly in "the soldiers' charge" up San 
Juan Hill into the Spanish intrenchments. The At 
fame of "the Colonel" from these achievements, San juan 
duly "featured" by the newspaper men with the troops, 
was soon to give a new turn to American politics, — not the 
least of the results of the war. 



614 



WAR WITH SPAIN 



George 
Dewey at 
Manila 



San Juan made it impossible for the Spaniards to long 
hold the harbor of Santiago. They had collected a strong 
Battle of fleet there, to threaten the seacoast cities of 
Santiago America, but it had been at once blockaded by a 
stronger American squadron. Fearing capture by our land 
army, the Spanish fleet now put to sea and scattered in 
flight. In the four hours' running fight that followed, every 
Spanish vessel was sunk or driven a blackened wreck on 
the shore, every man dead or captive, while no American 
vessel was injured and only one sailor was killed. 

At the outbreak of the war, unfriendly German and French 
naval authorities had not hesitated to express their con- 
viction (and apparently their hope) that the 
Spanish fleet would quickly drive the American 
from the sea. But even before this battle of 
Santiago, in a still more famous struggle the American navy 
had proven its superiority in sailing and in gunnery. When 
war was declared. Commodore George Dewey was in command 
of a small squadron on the coast of China. He sailed at 
once for the Philippines, then a Spanish possession, and, on 
May 1, entered Manila Bay over mine-strewn waters, 
destroyed or captured the Spanish fleet under the guns of 
the land fortress, and, in cooperation with native insurgents, 
began the siege of the city. 

The blockade of Manila had its own spectacular incidents. 
Soon after Dewey's naval victory, European men-of-war 
And von began to gather in the harbor, ^ — ^among them, three 
Diedrich English ships and a strong German squadron. 
Germany had shown much sympathy for Spain, and the 
German commander at Manila, Admiral von Diedrich, now 
acted toward the Americans in a most disagreeable and irri- 
tating manner. He repeatedly disregarded the American 
patrol regulations, and finally landed supplies for the 
Spaniards in flat opposition to the American blockade. 
This brought a crisis. Dewey sent him a brusque protest, 
adding as the messenger was setting out, — "And say to 
Admiral von Diedrich that if he wants a fight, he can have 
it now." In a rage, von Diedrich hurried to Captain 



GEORGE DEWEY AT MANILA 615 

Chichester, the commander of the EngHsh war ships, and 
asked that officer bkmtly whether he had instructions as to 
what to do if a conflict took place between the Germans and 
Americans. "I have," repHed the Briton. "May I ask 
what they are?" insisted the German, "Ah," drawled 
Chichester, "only two persons here know that, — myself 
and Commodore Dewey." Thereafter von Diedrich was 
better mannered. 

From the opening of the war, it is now known, Germany 
wished Europe to interfere upon the side of Spain, and 
she was kept from active hostility mainly by the And English 
pronounced friendliness of the English govern- sympathy 
ment for America. And this friendly English feeling was 
characteristic of all classes in that country. American 
visitors in England during the war tell us, often with 
amazement, how at the movies a picture of an American 
ship or an American officer always brought the audience 
to its feet in cheers, while Spanish pictures were signals 
for catcalls and jeers. 

A chief lesson from the war was the unpreparedness and 
inefficiency of the War Department. The Spanish surrender 
in Cuba came none too soon. A few days more Government 
would have seen the American army routed by inefficiency 
disease. Medicines were lacking ; transportation was in- 
sufficient ; troops were sent to Cuba in midsummer clothed 
in sweltering woolens, with repulsive "embalmed beef" as 
a large part of their food. Red tape and mismanagement 
prevented any improvement even for some weeks after the 
struggle was over, until, largely at Roosevelt's suggestion, 
a number of officers joined in a "round robin," making the 
disgraceful and dangerous conditions public. Even at the 
recruiting camps in x\merica, sanitation had been shame- 
fully neglected : at Tampa and Chickamauga, more soldiers 
died from dysentery than fell in battle in Cuba. 

In the treaty of peace, Spain left Cuba free, and ceded to 
the United States Porto Rico, Guam (in the Ladrones), and 
the Philippines, accepting $20,000,000 in compensation for 



616 AFTER THE WAR WITH SPAIN 

the last. Other territorial expansion, too, came as a result 
of the war. In 1897 President McKinley had revived the 
New treaty to annex Hawaii. The necessary two- 

possessions thirds vote in the Senate could not be secured ; 
but after the opening of the Spanish War, Congress annexed 
the Hawaiian Islands by a joint resolution — as Texas had 
been acquired many years before. About the same time, 
several small islands in the Pacific, not claimed by any 
civilized power, were seized for naval and telegraph stations ; 
and, in rearrangements at Samoa, due to native insurrec- 
tions and to conflicting claims by England, Germany, and 
the United States, this country secured the most important 
island in that group. 

In 1900 Hawaii was organized as a "Territory" on much 
the usual self-governing plan. Porto Rico, with its civilized 
but unfriendly Spanish population, presented a diflBcult 
problem. At present, the government contains a repre- 
sentative element, but real control rests in officials appointed 
by the United States. 

On the whole the American pledge to leave Cuba inde- 
pendent was honorably kept, though the Cuban constitu- 
America tional Convention (of 190'2) was required to consent 
and Cuba i\^^i tl^g United States might hold points on the 
coast for naval stations and should have the right to 
interfere, if necessary, to save the island from foreign en- 
croachment or domestic convulsion. 
^ Preceding the establishment of the Cuban Republic by 
this convention, there had been a necessary three-years 
occupation by American troops under General Leonard 
Wood. This military government brought great blessings 
to the island. It established order, relieved immediate 
suffering, organized a permanent and noble system of hos- 
pitals and schools, built roads, cleaned up cities, and created 
adequate water supplies. For the first time in. 140 years 
Havana was freed from yellow fever. In the course of this 
amazing and beneficent sanitary work in the pest-ridden 
island, Major Walter Reed, a United States surgeon, proved 



THE SETTLEMENT 617 

that yellow fever is transmitted by the mosquito bite. That 
discovery ranks among the foremost achievements of 
modern science. There is no praise too warm for the high 
resolve and steadfast heroism — ■ unsurpassed amid the 
horrors of a battlefield — with which a splendid group of 
American officers risked their lives day after day in that 
obscure and baffling struggle against a disease that had 
long been a chief scourge of the human race. 

The Philippines contain 115,000 square miles, broken 
into a thousand islands. Two thirds of these are too small 
for habitation ; and half the total area is comprised The 
in two islands. The eight million inhabitants range Philippines 
from primitive savagery, of the poisoned arrow stage, to civi- 
lization, and speak a score of different tongues and dialects. 
Five sevenths of the whole number are Catholics ; the stal- 
wart Moros are Mohammedan; the "wild" half million are 
divided among primitive superstitions. The centuries of 
Spanish rule have left much Spanish blood, mixed with 
native, in the more civilized districts ; and commercial 
interests account for a considerable European population 
at Manila and some other ports. 

In 1896 the islanders had attempted one of their many ris- 
ings against Spanish rule. The Spanish government brought 
it to a close by promising reforms and paying the leader 
Aguinaldo to leave the islands. The reforms were not 
carried out, and only a part of the promised money was 
paid ; and when Dewey was about to attack the Spanish 
in the islands, he invited Aguinaldo to return with him from 
China, in order to organize a native insurrection to cooperate 
with the American invasion. The insurgents hailed the 
Americans as deliverers, and took an active part in the 
siege and capture of Manila. Soon, however, the American 
commanders received instructions from Washington not to 
treat the islanders as allies, but to assert American sover- 
eignty over them. This led to war. After two years of 
regular campaigns against 50,000 American troops, the 
natives took to guerrilla warfare — in which their ferocious 



618 



AFTER THE WAR WITH SPAIN 



and the 
Antis 



barbarities were sometimes imitated all too successfully 
by the Americans. In 1902 the United States declared the 
"rebellion" subdued. 

It was after much hesitation that President McKinley's 
administration decided to hold the Philippines as a depend- 
ency — as England holds India. Certainly the 
riaiism " poHcy was new for America, and it was at once 
attacked vehemently by the Democrats, and by 
many progressive thinkers outside that part}^ 
as Imperialism. The Anti-imperialists urged that such a 
policy not only involved bad faith with the Filipinos, but 
that it contravened the fundamental principles of our 
Declaration of Independence and that it must divert energy 
from our own problems.^ 

On the other hand, the Imperialists, or "Expansionists," 
insisted that the United States could no longer shirk responsi- 
bilities as a world power. The Filipinos, they said, were not 
fit for self-government; American sentiment would not 
tolerate returning them to Spain ; and Dewey's conquest 
left America answerable not only for the Philippines them- 
selves, but, more immediately^ for European and American 
settlers and interests at Manila. These forces for expansion 
were reinforced, of course, by commercial greed and gross 
pride of power. 

Imperialism was a leading issue in the campaign of 1900 ; 

but Mr. Bryan, once more the Democratic candidate, compli- 

The election cated the matter unhappily l)y forcing into the 

Democratic platform a declaration for the dying 

16 to 1" cause. Again the reform forces were divided. 



of 1900 



' Congress refused to recognize the Filipinos as citizens of the United States, 
distinctly rejecting the plea that "the Constitution follows the flag." It even 
refused to include the islands within the customs boundary of the United States. 
Our sugar trust and other protected interests demanded that the tariff on Philippine 
sugar, tobacco, and some other products be continued. In the main, Congress 
complied. The islanders had expected a free American market as one of the com- 
pensations for the lack of independence, and they regarded this policy as gross 
injustice, savoring of Spanish methods. The Supreme Court, however, by a 
series of decisions — usually by a five-to-four vote — upheld the authority of 
Congress to rule and tax these dependencies at will, since they "belong to" but 
are not "part of" the United States, as in the old Louisiana and Florida decisions. 



IMPERIALISM 619 

Some radicals believed in "expansion," and others, fearing 
"imperialism," feared free silver more. Hanna, again the 
Republican manager, made skillful use of returned proi^ 
perity under Republican rule, appealing to workingmen 
with the campaign emblem of "the full dinner-pail." Mr. 
McKinley was reelected, with Theodore Roosevelt as Vice 
President. 

"Free Silver" passed out of politics after this campaign. 
In 1890 gold was discovered in Alaska, and soon that wild 
country was pouring a yellow flood into the mints ^j^^ passing 
of the world — as new mines in South Africa had of old 
begun to do a little earlier still. Between 1898 ^''"^^ 
and 1904, three quarters of a billion of gold money was 
coined in the United States. The debtor class could no 
longer claim that the value of gold was appreciating. 

" Imperialism," too, soon ceased to be a burning question. 
At first the Philippines were ruled by a Governor-general 
and a Commission. These American officials gradually 
introduced a limited local self-government for the more 
civilized districts, and in 1907 a small electorate of natives 
were permitted by Congress to elect a lower House of a 
Philippine Assembly with slight legislative power. In 1913 
President Wilson greatly extended the appointment of na- 
tives to responsible positions ; and the Philippine Govern- 
ment bill of 1916 placed the islands very nearly in the 
position of a "Territory." The Governor and Vice- 
Governor are still Americans ; all other officials may be 
Filipinos ; the electorate was extended some fourfold ; 
the upper House of the Assembly was made elective like 
the lower ; and the Assembly was given control of all 
internal legislation, subject to veto by the President of the 
United States. The absurd tariff discrin^inations (note 
above) have been practically removed. A large party of 
the most capable and honorable natives are increasingly 
desirous of complete independence, but they feel it merely 
a matter of time until their end will be conceded them by 
better informed American opinion. 



620 



AMERICA AND CHINA 



The first fruit of the new place of America as a World 
Power was the preservation of China. England had long 
America held Certain ports in that country, and within 
&j^^C)nn&: g^ fg^ years Germany, France, and Russia had 
door " begun rapidly to seize province after province, 

poucy In 1899 McKinley's Secretary of State, John 

Hay, sent a note to all powers interested in China urging 
them to agree that no power should shut out the citizens 
of other countries from its "sphere of influence" there. 
This ''open door'' policy, though disliked by Russia and 
Germany, already had the support of England, and it 
was favored, of course, by the small commercial coun- 
tries. The forceful statement of the American position 
just at that time had much to do with preventing the 
threatened dismemberment of China. After the Boxer 
Rising, some of the large European powers seemed again 
about to take up their old policy of seizing "territorial in- 
demnities." A strong protest from Secretary Hay induced 
them, however, to accept money indemnities instead. The 
indemnity paid by China to the United States, it should be 
noted, proved much too large ; and, after all just claimants 
had been paid, the balance was honorably returned. 

In this matter of the "Open Door," the immediate in- 
centive of American policy was the wish to prevent the 
exclusion of American trade from rich Oriental provinces ; 
but that policy fell in happily with the interests of civiliza- 
tion and humanity. The main opposition to the American 
policy — in ways both secret and open — came from Kaiser 
Wilhelm of Germany. In a moment of justifiable irritation 
at the German government's methods, Hay exclaimed, " I 
had almost rather be the dupe of China than the chum of the 
Kaiser." 

While Hay was still engaged in this correspondence with 
European powers regarding China, an anarchist murdered 
Roosevelt William McKinley, and that suave, gentle, cau- 
President tious President was succeeded by the impetuous, 
aggressive, positive Roosevelt. Hay remained Secretary of 
State. In 1904, at the opening of the war in the Orient 



THEODORE ROOSEVELT 621 

between Russia and Japan, Hay obtained pledges from both 
countries to respect the neutrality of China, and the next 
year Roosevelt intervened actively to bring about peace. 

The accession of Roosevelt, it was soon plain, had brought 
a new force into American relations with foreign powers, 
but the main foreign problems of his administra- Roosevelt 
tion had to do with Central America. The Latin and 
states of America still need capital for their ^''"^^^y 
development, and sometimes they invite it by granting 
foreigners valuable franchises and "concessions." Some- 
times, too, a corrupt government sells such "concessions" 
for far less than their value — to fill its private pockets. 
All such grants, corrupt or legitimate, are apt to be 
resented by the native population, and are sometimes 
revoked by succeeding governments. In this, and in 
many other ways, foreigners acquire claims against these 
countries which the states are unwilling or unable to 
pay. The United States has long taken the ground that 
the use of national force to recover such claims for a private ^^ 
citizen is improper. England has usually adhered to the 
like policy. But other powerful nations have commonly 
shown a readiness to collect such private debts for their 
citizens by force or threats of force. In 1902 ten European 
countries had claims, aggregating some $38,000,000, against 
Venezuela. Castro, President of the Republic, defied 
the claimants. Finally Germany and England began a 
blockade of Venezuelan ports. It soon became plain that 
Germany aimed at permanent occupation, and England 
withdrew her vessels. Then Roosevelt proposed arbitration 
to the Kaiser, and, when the suggestion was ignored, he 
abruptly forced the withdrawal of the German fleet by the 
threat of instant war.^ The subsequent arbitration re- 
vealed gross padding and unreasonableness in the European 
claims ; and the commission cut the amounts down to less 

^ This fact was not made public until after the opening of the World War. 
At the time, Roosevelt permitted the Kaiser to share in the credit for arranging 
arbitration. 



622 AMERICA A WORLD POWER 

than eight millions. Then, under pressure from this country, 
Venezuela made provision to pay this amount. 

This last event has been said to create a '"New Monroe 
Doctrine." Europeans had long expressed the opinion that 
if the Monroe Doctrine made us the protector 
states' of semi-anarchic communities against just claims, 

responsi- then we must ourselves see that such debts were 
Spanish- paid. Roosevelt seemed to assent to this doc- 
American trine. He took the ground, in this dispute, that 
if "chronic wrong-doing" or "impotence" in 
any American country called for intervention, then it 
, would become necessary for the United States to "exercise 
^ an international police power." In 1904 he went even 
further, when he stepped in to obviate European inter- 
vention in bankrupt San Domingo, by virtually making 
the United States the "receiver" for that country in behalf 
of its creditors, — a course that has ever since entailed 
troublesome relations with that island, culminating in 
despotic military rule by United States naval officers and 
marines for many years, with much bloody slaughter as 
recently as 1920. This policy has been severely criticized 
also on the ground that it encourages foreign capitalists to 
engage in the wildest financial schemes in South America, 
guaranteeing them their claim through United States in- 
tervention. 

More important still was the movement for the Panama 
Canal. In 1881 a French Panama Canal Company began 
The Panama work at the Istlimus, but eight years later the 
Canal project Came to an ignoble end in financial scandal, 

with little to show for the $260,000,000 expenditure. Secre- 
tary Blaine was then desirous of making the Canal the concern 
of the United States government; but the Clayton-Bulwer 
treaty prevented. The Spanish War brought the matter 
forcibly to public attention again, — especially when the 
battleship Oregon, much needed to reinforce the American 
Atlantic squadron, had to circle the Horn to get to Cuban 
waters. The American people began to demand an inter- 
^ oceanic canal under American control ; and the extremely 



PEACE MOVEMENTS 



623 



cordial attitude of England during the struggle made it easy 
now to secure from her a waiver of her rights under the ancient 
treaty. Then in 1902 the United States bought up the rights 
of the Panama Company. The government was unwilling, 
however, to undertake so vast a work unless it could secure 
sovereignty over a considerable strip of territory, so as 
to police the route effectively. Colombia refused the treaty 
urged upon it by President Roosevelt. The American 
government felt that it was being held up for unreasonable 




Panama Canal : ut the Ninaflores Locks, looking north, showing S. S. Santa 
Clara in lower west chamber, ready for water to be lowered to sea level. 

booty. Two weeks later an opportune revolution in the 
little republic separated Panama from Colombia. American 
naval forces were so disposed as to assist the revolution 
materially ; and ex-President Roosevelt has acknowledged 
that the revolt was directly manipulated from Washington. 
(Said he frankly some years later, "I took Panama.") 
The new Panama Republic immediately made the necessary 
cession to the United States.^ Then the Canal was under- 

* In 1918 President Wilson's administration negotiated a treaty to satisfy 
Colombia, by the payment of $25,000,000. The Senate Committee on Foreign 



624 AMERICA A WORLD POWER 

taken as a National project. Astounding problems of 
labor, sanitation, supplies, and engineering were solved 
effectively, and in 1915 the Canal was formally opened. 

The United States took a creditable part at the Hague 

Conference in 1899 and at the second meeting in 1907. 

During the years 1903-1905 thirty-three separate 

The Hague . .."^ . / • ^^ '^ ^ 

Conference treaties between various iliUropean powers pro- 
and arbitra- yidcd for arbitration of international differences 
by the Hague Tribunal or some other standing 
commission. In all this the United States had no part. In 
1904 ten such treaties negotiated by Secretary Hay with 
important countries were submitted to our Senate for rati- 
fication, with the strong indorsement of President Roosevelt. 
The Senate, influenced by general factiousness and by dislike 
of the strenuous President, rendered the treaties useless by 
unacceptable amendments, as it had rejected the earlier pro- 
posal of like character between England and the United 
States (page 612) . Some like treaties were afterward ratified, 
but during the sessions of 1911 and 1912, the Senate showed 
marked hostility to another extension of the principle of 
arbitration strongly urged by President Taft. ^ 

All these treaties, too, left loopholes for passion and war 
by exempting from arbitration questions "affecting the 
national honor." In 1913-1914, Mr. Bryan, as Secretary of 
State for President Wilson, did secure the ratification '.^f 
treaties "further to promote peace" with England and 
France, and with many smaller states, providing in each 
case that the two parties shall submit all disputes to an 
impartial tribunal for investigation and report, with a year's 
interval for negotiation and reflection, before making war. 
But the absence of Germany's name from all these lists of 
arbitration treaties, and her defeat of England's proposals 
for disarmament at the Hague Congresses were ominous of 
peril. In the absence of effective provision for world dis- 
armament, there was still no assurance of continued peace. 

AflFairs reported favorably on this treaty, but it has not been approved by the 
Senate. 



CHAPTER XLI 

THE PEOPLE VS. PRIVILEGE 

The fundamental division of powers in the Constitution of the United 
States is between voters on the one hand and property owners on the other. 
The forces of democracy, on one side, divided between the execidive and 
the legislature, are set over against the forces of property on the other side, 
with the judiciary as arbiter between them. — Arthur T. Hadley, Presi- 
dent of Yale, in The Independent, April 16, 1908. 

About 1890, social unrest was becoming the most marked 
feature of American life. The "business age" since the 
Civil War had seen wealth multiply enormously ; <, . . 
but that wealth had become more and more con- unrest and 
centrated in a few hands, and those hands more special 

privil6ff© 

and more dominated politics and the daily life of 
every citizen. In nearly every State of the Union, in the 
late sixties and the seventies, groups of keen, forceful men, 
more farsighted than their neighbors, grasped for them- 
selves the main resources and opportunities, — mines, for- 
ests, water power, lines of easy rail communication, and 
so on. These rising capitalists then reached out for 
special privileges. To obtain these, they set themselves 
deliberately to fill legislatures, courts, and governors' 
chairs with their creatures, and to entrench themselves 
behind laws framed for their advantage. The old forms of 
popular government were untouched ; but the people had 
let real mastery in city, State, and Nation slip to a narrow 
plutocracy, which fed fat at the general expense and made 
the "representatives" of the public its private errand boys. 
The industrial organization had come to produce wealth 
with gratifying rapidity, but failed to distribute it well. 
Between 1860 and 1900 the ratio of wealth to popula- 
tion (per capita wealth) was magnified by four, but the 

625 



626 THE PEOPLE VS. PRIVILEGE 

average workman was not four times better off. Accord- 
ing to careful investigation by the Bureau of Labor, he was 
only a fourth better off, while great multitudes 
in distribu- Were vastly worse off. Nine tenths the vast in- 
tionof crease of wealth went to one tenth the popula- 

^"^^ tion, while at least two tenths of the people were 

reduced to a stage of poverty where health and decency 
are imperiled. The tenth at the apex of the social pyra- 
mid contains real "captains of industry," but it contains 
also pirates and parasites. Service to society has less to 
do with its revenues than plunder and privilege have. 
The two tenths at the base of the pyramid contain many 
men whose poverty results from physical or mental or 
moral lack, — though these qualities are quite as often a 
result of poverty as a cause, for it is even truer now than in 
Solomon's day that "the destruction of the poor is their 
poverty" ; but the base contains also multitudes of willing, 
hard-working, sober men and women who deserve a chance, 
now denied, at decent, useful, happy lives. ^ America is 
rich, but too many Americans are horribly poor. And this 
modern poverty is harder to bear than that of colonial times 
because it seems less necessary. Then there was little 
wealth to divide. Now the poor man is jostled by osten- 
tatious affluence marked by wasteful and sometimes vicious 
expenditure. Moreover, in the early day, when no man 
was very rich anyway, there was always one lever within reach 
to help lessen the inequalities, — namely, free land at every 
man's door. Since 1800 this condition has been increasingly 
remote, — appertaining to a distant frontier, — and since 
1890 it has disappeared from American life. 

Combination in the management of industry follows 
naturally from modern facilities like the railway and the 

1 During 1907-1909 a committee of the New York Association of Charities and 
Corrections to study the standard of living in New York City investigated many 
hundreds of families in different strata of working people. These studies proved 
definitely that at that time of "prosperity," a very large proportion of working 
men's families received an income too small to maintain physical efficiency even 
with the best of management — though medical care and dentistry were secured 
through free dispensaries and though no allowance was made for savings. 



WATERED STOCK 627 

telegraph. It makes possible the use of costlier machinery, 
utilizes former wastes into by-products, and saves labor of 
hand and brain. This ought to mean a cooperative The 
saving for all : in actual fact, it has meant too problem 
often a monopoly privilege of plunder for a few. The prob- 
lem of the age is to secure the proper gains of inevitable and 
wholesome combination and at the same time to restore to 
the individual his industrial and political liberty. For a 
generation after the war that freed the slave, moral en- 
thusiasm had small place in politics. Commercialism held 
the reins. New evils grew upon the life of the people with 
little check, so long as they threw no immediate obstacles 
in the path of "prosperity's" chariot wheels. But about 
1890 a new tide of moral earnestness began to swell in 
American life, comparable only with that which marked 
the days of Abraham Lincoln. Again the people heard the 
call to line up in a struggle for Social Justice against 
Vested Wrong and Special Privilege, which, like the Slave 
Power, reaped where they had not sown. The Nation 
awoke shamed ; but it awoke in the dark, enmeshed in a 
net of intangible chains — not least powerful among which 
were the old traditions of an age of free competition which 
had passed away from all but the imagination — and it 
found itself for a time curiously unable to grapple with its 
enemy. The struggle is best seen in the story of the rail- 
roads, of the trusts, and of political corruption. 

RAILROADS 

In the 70's, railway construction had outrun the real 
business demand, and the roads were driven to ferocious 
and ruinous competition. In '73 came a "panic," Over-capi- 
properly known as a "railroad panic." Railroad taiization 
presidents explained it on this ground of over-mvestment ; 
but another cause, at least as important, was over-capitali- 
zation. The operating companies really were poor ; but the 
men who had built the roads, and "inside" manipulators 
like the Goulds and Vanderbilts, had become fabulously 



0^28 THE PEOPLE VS. PRIVILEGE 

rich. Often they had put in practically no money, — build- 
ing the roads from National or State grants,' or with money 
borrowed by bond sales, secured on the future road. Then 
they had sold stock, to any amount which they could per- 
suade a credulous public to buy, pocketing the millions of 
proceeds, and leaving the corporations upon which they 
had "unloaded" to extort in rates from the people the in- 
terest not only on the legitimate investment, but also on 
this "water." . 

The public-service corporations, such as railroads and 
city gas companies, have peculiar facilities for selling 
„, . such over-issues of stock because of the monopoly 
stock a privilege conferred upon them by society. In- 

product of deed, "watered stock," upon which dividends can 
really be paid, represents monopoly, natural or 
artificial. Whenever dividends become so large as to 
incur danger from popular indignation (say 12 per cent), 
it has been the practice of public-service corporations to 
disguise their profits by issuing more stock (each holder 
receiving perhaps two shares for one). The company then 
claims the right to charge enough to pay a "reasonable" 
dividend of at least 6 per cent upon this "water," urging 
especially the rights of "widows and orphans" who have 
acquired stock by innocent purchase. Such dividends rep- 
resent an imreasonable tax upon the community, including 
multitudes of other widows and orphans, who are forced 
to pay higher prices for almost all commodities. Until 

^ Before IS?.", more than L)0 millions of acres had been granted to railroads 
out of the public domain (about as much as passed to settlers under the Home- 
stead Act up to 1900) besides lavish "bounties" paid by rival towns along possible 
routes. In 187-2 every party platform demanded that such grants cease. Presi- 
dent Cleveland's first Message (1885) dwelt upon the shamelessness with which 
the nation's "princelj' grants " for public uses had been "diverted to private gains 
and corrupt uses," and Congress then enforced the forfeiture to the government 
of many million acres, for non-fulfillment of contracts by the companies. The worst 
offenders, however, could no longer be reached. When Mr. C. P. Huntington (one 
of the magnates who had wrung vast fortunes out of Pacific railroad manipulations) 
was told that the government woidd take possession of his road if he failed still to 
keep his contracts, he answered callously: "(^uite welcome. There is nothing 
left but two streaks of rust." 



I 



RAILWAY CONSOLIDATION AND RATES G29 

quite lately, little attempt was made to prevent stock- 
watering, and public control is not yet efficient. In gen- 
eral, when the "water" has once been marketed, the courts 
have protected the corporations in their claims to dividend- 
paying rates. 

In the five years following the panic of '73, half the 
railway mileage in the country was sold under the hammer 
or passed into the hands of "receivers." This Railway 
condition gave special opportunity for strong lines confoiida- 
to absorb weak ones, and explains in part the ^^°^ 
rapid consolidation of that period (page 584). That con- 
solidation put an end to the worst of the old cut-throat 
competition for freight business. Still further to prevent 
rate-wars, the roads within a given territory (as between 
Chicago and New York) adopted the plan, about 1880, of 
throwing all earnings into a common "pool," to be divided 
according to a set ratio. This device restored the railroad 
to its natural place as a monopoly. 

True, with the swelling of business, freight rates continued 
to fall ^ — but not so fast as did the cost of transportation, 
because of bigger engines, larger train-loads, and 
longer hauls. The public did not get its share 
of the saving. Railway profits rose so as to permit high 
dividends upon the watered stock, even after wasteful 
management. In fixing rates for localities where 07ie road 
controlled the freight business, the maxim early became 
"all the traffic will bear." ^ The road, existing by virtue of 
a franchise from the people, and sometimes built Discrimi- 
by other gifts from the people, extorted from the nation 
people all their surplus profits above what it seemed ad- 
visable to leave them in order to induce them to go on 

' In 1865 the average rate for one ton one mile was about 2 cents. By 1877, 
it was if cents, and in 1900 only f of a cent. But in spite of these low averages, 
many localities paid much higher rates. Moreover, long hauls, as in carrying Mon- 
tana cattle to Chicago, or Kansas wheat to New York, cost so much less than small 
local business that the roads made huge profits at the lowest rates — while even 
those "low" rates confiscated the inland farmer's profits. 

^ In 1885 a committee of the United States Senate asserted that railroad rates 
generally were based, not on cost of service, but on "what the traffic would bear." 



630 THE PEOPLE VS. PRIVILEGE 

producing more freight. Roads used their power, too, to 
destroy one city and build up another, sometimes perhaps 
to give a chance to those "on the inside" for profits in real 
estate. Often they favored large cities at the expense of 
small ones, and gave lower rates to large shippers than to 
small ones. This last and worst abuse was secret, and the 
companies were sometimes the unwilling victims themselves. 
To get the business of great shippers, they felt compelled 
to submit to demands for secret rates ; and sometimes they 
even favored such a shipper by imposing a particularly high 
rate upon a competing shipper. At one time the growing 
Standard Oil Company ordered a railway to "give another 
twist to the screw" upon a rival oil company which it 
desired to put out of business. 

For long the intense desire for railway advantages pre- 
vented attempts at public regulation of these abuses. The 
region northwest of Chicago and west of the Mississippi in 
the sixties and seventies was peculiarly the creation of the 
railway. While these communities were in their hopeful 
youth, they had eagerly offered every possible inducement 
to railway promoters. Later, especially in periods of busi- 
ness depression, they began to feel keenly the mastery of 
the railway over their fortunes, and to agitate against it. 
In the early seventies, over the Northwest there sprang up 
The organizations of farmers calling themselves "Pa- 

Grangers trons of Husbandry," ^ or Grangers, to do away 
with unfair railway discrimination and unduly high rates. 
They held the railway a quasi-public business, subject to 
public regulation through legislation, as the ferryboat and 
inn had been regarded for centuries by the Common Law ; 
and under their impulse several States fixed freight rates by 
law. In 1871 Illinois took the wise method of appointing 
a State Railway Commission to fix rates and prevent dis- 
criminations. This example was soon followed throughout 

^ Each local organization was a "Grange." It was a farmers' club; the men 
talked politics at the meetings, while the women got a picnic supper ready. These 
"granges" were federated in State organizations. The Grangers were the first 
workingmen's party in rural districts. The most complete study of the move- 
ment is in Solon J. Buck's The Agrarian Crusade (1920). 



THE GRANGERS 631 

the West and Southwest, and much other restrictive legis- 
lation was adopted. 

The railways, and the Eastern bondholders whose money 
had largely built them, railed at all such legislation, not 
merely as unwise but as wicked and confiscatory. The 
railway, they held, was a private business ; and legislatures 
had no more right to fix its rates than to fix the price at 
which a store should sell shoes. In 1877, however, in a 
famous decision (Munn vs. Illinois) the Supreme p^^^ ^j^^j^ 
Court declared that such institutions as railways bequest to 
and warehouses existed subject to the power of the 
body politic to regulate them for the public good. American 
law took a great step forward in this decision. And it 
came about because the disorderly, debtor, relatively igno- 
rant West, vmder the pressure of its needs, had seen further 
than the cultured, wealthy, comfortable East. 

Much of the Granger legislation was unreasonable. The 
legislators were largely untrained, ignorant men ; and they 
worked in the dark anyway because the railumys refused to 
make public any information about the business. Some- 
times, too, the legislation was infused with a bitter desire 
for retaliation. On the other hand, the Companies fought 
the most proper regulation by despicable methods. They 
bulldozed timid business interests by ceasing railway 
extension, or threatening to cease it ; and when a law had 
been enacted they commonly kept it ineffective by getting 
repeated delays in the courts from judges whom, in many 
cases, they had influenced by political support or by free 
passes and other disgraceful favors. Most of the Granger 
laws were finally repealed. Railway commissions, how- 
ever, are now found in almost every State, with authority 
at least to investigate charges and give publicity to facts 
about the railroad business ; and, most important of all, 
the Granger movement did bring about the supremely 
important advance in American law noted above. 

Next came attempts at National control. From the first, 
one argument against the Granger State laws had been that 



68(^ THE PEOPLE VS. PRIVILEGE 

only Congress had the right to regulate interstate commerce 
— and nearly all railway business came under this head. 
In 1886 the Supreme Court took this ground in a 
state Com- Sweeping decision, declaring that a State could not 
merce Act regulate the carriage of goods billed to another 
State even for that part of the journey within its own 
borders. This put an end to effective regulation of railroads 
by the States, but it did not affect the previous decision that 
the public had the right through some agency to control these 
"common carriers." The only remaining agency was Con- 
gress. So far that body had refused to act ; but now (1887) 
it passed the Interstate Comvierce Act, forbidding pooling, 
secret rates, and all kinds of discriminations, and creating 
a Commission to investigate complaints and punish offenses. 
This law promised a better day. The roads, however, 
persistently evaded or disobeyed it, and its main intent was 
And the 500 ?i r/i//Z(^6'c? by dccisious of the courts. Congress 
Supreme meant to make the Commission the final authority 
^°"'* as to facts, leaving to the Federal courts only a 

power to review the decisions, on appeals, as to their rea- 
sonableness, the facts being taken as the Commission had 
determined them. The courts, however, decided to permit 
the introduction of netv evidence on such appeals. This meant 
a new trial in every case, and destroyed the character of 
the Commission. The Commission was hampered, too, by 
other decisions of the courts — as by one which set aside 
its authority to compel the companies to produce their 
books. As the veteran Justice Harlan declared indignantly, 
in a dissenting opinion, the Commission was "shorn hy 
judicial interpretation of authority to do anything of effective 
character.'' In 1898 the Commission itself formally declared 
its position "intolerable." 

The Hep- ^^ Roosevelt's administration the Hepburn Act 

burn Act, (1906) souglit to revive the authority of the Com- 
mission, empowering it even to fix "just and 
reasonable rates," subject to review by the Federal courts. i 

1 In 1910 all such appeals were referred to a new Commerce Court created espe- 
cially to deal with them. Radicals looked askance at this new court, whose 



AND THE RAILWAY 633 

The law also forbade roads to grant free passes, give 
"rebates" (partial repayments), or carry their own produce. 

1. Lavish grants of passes, good for a year, and renewed 
each New Year's day, extending sometimes to free travel 
across the continent and back, had been one of the Free passes 
most common means of indirect bribery of legisla- forbidden 
tors, congressmen, and newspapers. Sometimes a judge 
traveled on such a pass to the court where he tried cases in 
which the railroad was a party. Apart from the corrupting 
influence of the practice, too, the public had of course to pay 
for the passes in higher rates. Congressional prohibition of 
free passes was preceded by similar prohibition in many of 
the States ; and this reform is now firmly established. 

2. Rebates had long been one of the chief methods of 
evading the Interstate Commerce law against discrimina- 
tions. Certain favored shippers, no longer given And 
better rates than their neighbors directly, were rebates 
still given secret rebates in coin, or, still less directly, were 
allowed to falsify their billing of freight, so as to bring it 
under a lower legal rate, or were paid unreasonable allow- 
ances for storing or handling freight themselves, or for the 
rent of private cars furnished by the customers. The re- 
ceivers of the Baltimore and Ohio Road in 1898 testified 
that more than half the freight of the country was still car- 
ried on discriminating rates. Says Professor Davis R. 
Dewey (National Problems, 103) : "The ingenuity of offi- 
cials in breaking the spirit of the law knew no limit and is 
a discouraging commentary on the dishonesty which had 
penetrated to the heart of business enterprise" ; and one of 
the great railroad presidents mourned, in 1907, that good 
faith had "departed from the railroad world." When com- 
pany and shipper agree in trying to deceive the authorities 
in such a matter, proof is exceedingly difficult ; and it is too 

members were all appointed at once for life by the conservative President Taft. 
and the feeling was soon justified. The Commerce Court hampered and harassed 
the great Interstate Commerce Commission, and in 1913 it was abolished. (Cf. 
page 358.) Shortly before, Justice Archbold, one of its members, had been removed 
for graft, by impeachment. Cf. page 362 and note. 



634 THE PEOPLE VS. PRIVILEGE 

much to suppose that the more stringent provisions of the 
Hepburn Act have wholly done away with this demoral- 
izing practice. 

3. Certain Pennsylvania roads owned the most im- 
portant coal mines in the country, and paid themselves 
Railways what they pleased, out of one pocket into another, 
and their for carrying coal to market, — so excusing them- 
"*"®^ selves for a higher price to the consumer. The 

last prohibition referred to above attempted to stop this 
practice. So far, the attempt is fruitless. The United 
States Steel Corporation mines iron in northern Minnesota. 
In deference to the Hepburn Act the Corporation is not 
also a railroad corporation ; but the same group of capitalists 
under another name own railroads (on the "community of 
interest" method) which carry the ore to market at extrav- 
agant rates. 

In 1914 this struggle with the railroads had gone on for 
two generations. Much time was lost because, for long, 
Failure many people hoped that rates could be kept 

of " regu- down if only free competition could be main- 
**^°° tained between rival roads. But when pooling 

was forbidden, the roads sought refuge in secret "rate 
agreements" among themselves; and when the Supreme 
Court in 1897 held such an "agreement" a "conspiracy 
in restraint of trade" (and, as such, forbidden by the 
Sherman Anti-trust Act of 1890), they merely consolidated 
ownership more rapidly than had ever before been dreamed 
possible (page 584). In 1904 the Supreme Court made a 
futile effort to stop this movement by declaring the con- 
solidation of parallel lines illegal (Northern Securities case) 
under the same Anti-trust Act. But, once more, combina- 
tion to avoid competition was merely driven to another dis- 
guise. The groups of capitalists no longer consolidated the 
Inter- stock of different companies into one, with one 

locking board of directors ; but they exchanged among 

irec orates ^J^ej^^gpives the stock of the different companies 
which they controlled, and memberships in the difiFerent 



I 



"BIG BUSINESS • 635 

governing boards, and so maintained a community of own- 
ership and management. In 1913, in the administration 
of Woodrow Wilson, an attempt was made to limit by law 
the memberships on such boards to be held by any one 
man, but no satisfactory result has yet been attained. 

Before America had been in the World War a year it was 
plain that consolidation of management had not gone far 
enough to secure efficient service for the public. The waste 
and the delays due to lack of unity in transportation became 
a national menace. The whole country, railway corporations 
included, breathed more freely when President Wilson 
seized control for the Nation, with one central authority. 
Necessarily the old managers were for the most part left in 
office ; and many charges were made that they deliberately 
sought to make the experiment unpopular by wasteful and 
inefficient service. At the close of the war, the roads were 
turned back to their old owners — under the Cummins-Esch 
bill — but a large part of organized labor and of the radical 
progressives are still calling for public ownership, with some 
device for sharing control between the government and the 
railway workers (the " Plumb Plan "). 

"BIG BUSINESS" 

The struggle with the railroads awakened society to the 
need of public control over other monopolies. Ownership 
of a water power or of a mine is a natural monopoly. An- 
other slightly different sort of monopoly is represented by 
certain kinds of business, like city lighting or city water 
supply, where competition is either altogether impossible, 
or where at least it would be excessively silly and waste- 
ful. Sometimes, in such cases, the public grants an ex- 
clusive franchise to some company, and so creates a legal 
monopoly. In any case, these forms of business are usu- 
ally classed with the "natural monopolies," since they are 
monopolistic "in the nature of the case." They derive 
their existence, however, not from nature alone but directly 
from some franchise grant by society ; and so they are 



636 THE PEOPLE VS. PRIVILEGE 

even more generally looked upon as suitable for control 
by society. 

And modern "big business" creates a still different sort 
of monopoly. A great manufacturing "trust" calls for 
An artificial SO much Capital that a competitor can hardly 
monopoly afford to try to build factories and secure ma- 
chinery, with the uncertainties of the certain commercial 
war before it. If the attempt is made, the stronger enter- 
prise kills off the other, if necessary by selling below cost, 
— recouping itself afterward by plundering the public when 
it again has the market to itself. This kind of monopoly 
is recent, and in outer form it resembles the competitive 
business of former days. Society awakened only slowly to 
the need of regulating it effectively for the common good. 
Even to-day such combinations are sheltered from public 
control, and sometimes from public investigation, by the 
legal principles of an outgrown age of individualism. 

The first famous illustration of this sort of monopoly was 
the Standard Oil Trust. Crude petroleum ("rock oil") had 
The been used for many years as a liniment known as 

standard "SenecaOil, " and about 1860 it began to be used, 
' ^^^ in a refined form, for illumination in place of the 
older "whale oil." Companies were soon formed to produce 
it on a large scale. In 1865 the Standard Oil Company 
was organized in Cleveland with a capital of only $100,000. 
Under the skillful management of John D. Rockefeller 
it soon began to absorb the other like companies in that 
city — which was already the center of the industry of 
refining crude petroleum. Thus it grew powerful enough, 
and its management was unscrupulous enough, to compel 
railway companies to set up secret discriminations far it, 
and against its rivals, until it absorbed or killed off most 
of the oil companies in the country. In 1870 the Stand- 
ard Oil was one of 250 competing companies, and its out- 
put was less than one twentieth the whole : in 1877 it 
controlled nineteen twentieths the output, and of the few re- 
maining companies the leading forty were "affiliated," and 
took orders from it. By grossly unfair and piratical 



THE TRUSTS 637 

methods it had made broken men or suicides of honest 
competitors. A powerful lobby long prevented legislative 
interference, and the Standard Oil attorneys were generally 
successful in the courts. Meantime its capital had been 
increased to 90 millions — on which it paid the enormous 
dividend of 20 millions of dollars. 

A few independent companies, however, were still putting 
up so stiflP a fight that a closer organization seemed needful to 
insure success for the monopoly ; and, in 1882, Rockefeller 
invented the "Hrust.''' The forty affiliated companies turned 
over their property to one board of nine trustees, each stock- 
holder in an old company receiving proper certificates of 
stock in the new organization. This board of trustees 
managed the whole business. The arrangement was secret 
and exceedingly informal and elastic. The trust was not 
incorporated. The trustees, when convenient, could easily 
deny knowledge of the doings of subordinate companies, 
or disavow responsibility for them ; and, with better 
reason, the companies could throw responsibility upon the 
intangible "trust.". 

Other industries seized at once upon this new device for 
consolidating management and capital. It proved eminently 
satisfactory to the average stockholder, though, in 
the process of organization, many small compa- 
nies were squeezed out of their property ; but it abolished 
competition, which had always been regarded as the sole 
safeguard alike of the consumer, of the small producer of 
raw material, and of the laborer. The Standard Oil Trust 
bought from the owner of an oil well at its own price, being 
practically the only buyer. So the Meat Trust bought 
from the cattle raiser. Then the trust sold its finished 
product at its own rate, — which was sometimes an ad- 
vance upon former prices, and which was never reduced 
enough to correspond ivith the decreased cost of production. 
The profits to the stockholders steadily mounted, even 
when prices became somewhat lower; and the "cost of liv- 
ing" was made unduly high. Sometimes, as with tin and 
steel plate of some sorts, the absence of competition, to- 



THE PEOPLE VS. PRIVILEGE 



gether with the prevalent low business morality, led to 
scandalous deterioration in the goods put upon the market, 
and so robbed the consumer doubly. 

Finally people took alarm. States enacted anti-trust 
legislation (for the most part, futile) ; and, in 1890, Congress 
passed the Sherman Anti-trust Act,^ forbidding 
Sherman "every Combination" in restraint of interstate 
^^^^'Jj^Q^ commerce. Again the Standard Oil led the way. 
With cheap, superficial obedience, it dissolved 
into twenty companies ; but one and the same group of 

capitalists retained the 
controlling interest in 
the stock of each com- 
pany, and composed the 
twenty ' ' interlocking 
boards of directors. 
Other trusts followed 
this method of main- 
taining "community of 
interest and manage- 
ment," as the railways 
were to do later (page 
634) ; or they reorgan- 
ized openly as huge cor- 
porations. The term 
"trust" was abandoned 
as a technical business 
term ; but it remains in popular use, properly enough, to 
describe either of these forms by which aggregated capital 
monopolizes an industry. 

Indeed, the monopolistic movement had only begun. In 
1890 there were a score of "trusts" in the United States with 
And its an aggregate capital of a third of a billion dollars, 

failure jjj 1899 there were about 150, mostly organized 

within two years, with a total capital of over three billions. 
In 1901, in the Roosevelt administration, came the organ- 

' So called from Senator John Sherman of Ohio, who, however, had little to 
do with drafting the law, though he advocated it in ardent speeches. 




Copyright by Keystone View Co. 

Ladle Pouring Molten Metal into Pig 
Ikon Machines, Pittsburg- 



"REGULATION" FAD.S 639 

ization of the United States Steel Corporation, with a total 
capitalization of $1,400,000,000, of which — according to a 
later government investigation — $400,000,000 was water. ^ 
Between 1900 and 1904 it is generally estimated that the 
number of trusts was multiplied by eight or nine, and that 
the capitalization rose from three billions to over thirty bil- 
Hons. Of this immense sum, a huge portion was in seven 
companies, and these had manifold and intricate ramifi- 
cations ; so that three or four men, perhaps, held real 
control. 

Attempts at State regulation of trusts to lessen the evils 
of monopoly have taken the form of State laws which permit 
incorporation only on condition (1) that there attempts 
shall be no stock-watering, (2) that publicity of at state 
management shall be secured, and (3) that offi- ""^suation 
cials may be held strictly to account. Such legislation, 
though characteristic of nearly every State, was long ren- 
dered of no account by three "trust-owned" States, — 
New Jersey, Delaware, and West Virginia. These three 
merely opened the door wider than before to incorpora- 
tions of every sort. A corporation organized in any 
State can do business in all, and can be deprived of its 
charter only by the home State. Accordingly, by 1907, 
95 per cent of the American trusts had found refuge in 
these three States. In 1913 their citadel in the favorite State 
of New Jersey seemed overthrown by the resolute democracy 
of the governor, Woodrow Wilson. On his last day of 
ofSce, after a splendid two-year battle, Governor Wilson 
signed seven "anti-trust" bills, which, it was boasted, would 
make New Jersey a "trust-proof" State. Practically all 
of these, however, have been found nugatory in practice, 
through the shrewdness of corporation lawyers and the 
rulings of courts ; and the opportunity for the trusts to 
pick any one of forty-eight States in which to corrupt a 
legislature or a court still makes it almost impossible for 
other States to control them. 

' An ominous fact was that this "trust" held title to more than four fifth,' 
of all known iron-ore lands in the Appalachian and Superior districts. 



640 THE PEOPLE VS. PRIVILEGE 

Some States early attempted to curb the power of monopoly, 
and to take back for the public at least a small part of its 
Trusts find Unreasonable profits, by taxing great corporations 
protection higher than ordinary individuals were taxed. 
Fourteenth This line of operation was also stopped at once 
amendment (1882) by the Supreme Court, under the author- 
ity of the Fourteenth aniendment, which forbade a State 
to discriminate among persons. In the case of California 
vs. the Southern Pacific Railroad the Court held that a 
corporation is a "person" in the meaning of the word in 
this amendment, — though no one thought of such a thing 
when the amendment was being ratified. Accordingly no 
taxation can be applied to corporations, even to specially 
favored public-service corporations, other than to other 
citizens. 

In no other civilized land is the government so power- 
less to deal with aggregated wealth as this decision made the 
States of the Union. The Fourteenth amendment had been 
robbed of its intent (to protect real persons, of dark skins) 
by previous decisions of the Court (page 564). By this deci- 
sion it was converted into a shield to protect artificial persons, 
in the shape of dangerous monopolies, from needful regu- 
lation by the people. The Southern Pacific case is to be 
coupled with the Dartmouth College case (page 292) as 
explaining how the Constitution has been made a shelter 
to property interests against public control far beyond 
anything contemplated even by the founders of the Con- 
stitution. For the next thirty years the Southern Pacific was 
"king" in California — until Hiram Johnson's victory in 
1911 (page 665). 

Said Senator Sherman, in the debate on the Anti-trust 
Act, in 1890: — 

"If the concentrated powers of this combination [the relatively 
small trusts of 1890] are entrusted to a single man, it is kingly 
prerogative, inconsistent with our form of government. ... If 
we will not endure a king as a political power, we should not endure a 
king over the production, transportation, and sale of any of the 



PUBLIC SERVICE CORPORATIONS G41 

necessities of life. If we would not submit to an emperor, we should 
not submit to an autocrat of trade with power to ... fix the price 
of any commodity." 

But the most serious power of such aggregated capital is 
exercised in indirect ways. It can, at will, withdraw money 
from circulation, compel banks, therefore, to con- j^^e rule of 
tract loans ; force factories, accordingly, even aggregated 
those not in any way owned by the combination, ^^** 
to shut down or to cut down output and discharge work- 
men ; and so bring on business depression and starvation. 
There seems little doubt that such power has been often 
used, in slight degree and for short flurries, to influence the 
stock market and favor gambling enterprises there ; and 
many thinkers believe that it has been used more than once 
to cause a "panic" in order to intimidate timid reformers 
in the battle for civic righteousness, — which might other- 
wise soon interfere with the money trust's ownership of 
judges and congressmen. The same tremendous power, 
without question, aims intelligently at the control of 
higher educational institutions and dominates multitudes 
of newspapers. 

PUBLIC SERVICE CORPORATIONS 

After the Civil War, the growth of cities and of new 
inventions began to give tremendous importance to gas 
companies, electric lighting companies, water com- 
panies, telephone companies, and street car com- service 
panics. The tendency toward municipal corruption corpora- 
was frightfully augmented by the growth of these new 
"public service corporations.'''' Each had to get the right to 
use the public streets for tracks or pipes or wires, in order 
to do business. In the early decades of the period, the 
company usually tried to get a charter giving it exclusive 
use of the streets, for its kind of business, for a long term 
of years or in perpetuity. At the same time it sought to 
escape any real public control over its rates or over the serv- 
ice it should render, by making vague the charter clauses 



642 THE PEOPLE VS. PRIVILEGE 

bearing on such matters, or by inserting "jokers" to de- 
stroy their apparent force. 

Shrewd men saw that such grants would become in- 
creasingly profitable with the growth of city population ; 
j^^ and, to secure them, some corporations found it 

municipal profitable to buy up public officials on a large 
corruption gQg^\^ jf ^ charter was decently just to the city, 
the corporation often prevented the enforcement of the best 
provisions for years by getting its own tools elected to legis- 
latures or city councils or judgeships, and by having other 
tools appointed to the inspectorships which were supposed 
to see that the company's service was as good as called for 
in its contract. 

These forces were largely responsible for an increased 
body of political "grafters" in the governing bodies of State 
and city, — • ivho were then ready to extend their operatio7is 
unhlushingly to other parts of the public business, as in extort- 
ing bribes from business men who wished contracts for 
furnishing supplies to the city or for building city improve- 
ments. Public graft became an organized business. City 
pay rolls were padded with names of men who rendered no 
service, sometimes of men who did not exist but whose 
salaries were drawn to fatten the income of some "boss." 
Important offices were turned over to incompetents, favored 
for political service. The corruption of American city 
government was exceeded only by its inefficiency.^ Com- 
monly, too, it allied itself not only with public, but also with 
private crime. Police departments permitted gamblers and 
thieves and thugs and dissolute women to ply their trades 
with impunity, so long as they did not become too notorious ; 
and in return the precinct captains collected each week 
regular pay envelopes from the criminals, — - the greater 
part of which went ultimately to higher officials, — chief 
of police, mayor, or political boss. 

^ About 1890 Andrew D. White visited many of the most important Euro- 
pean cities. At Constantinople, he wrote, the rotting docks and general evi- 
dence of inefficiency made him homesick: nowhere else had he been so reminded 
of American cities ( !) . 



MUNICIPAL CORRUPTION 643 

The first case of city corruption to catch the pubHc atten- 
tion was the infamous Tiveed Ring, which robbed New York 
City of a hundred niilhon dolhirs in two years (1869-1870). 
This ring was finally broken up, and "Boss" Tweed was 
sent to Sing-Sing, largely through the fearless skill of Samuel 
J. Tilden, soon after the Democratic candidate for the 
presidency (p. 571). For long it was a pet delusion of "re- 
spectable" Republicans that the New York scandal was an 
exceptional case, due to the deplorable fact that New York 
was controlled by a Democratic organization (Tammany) ; 
but later it developed that Tammany's methods were 
coarse and clumsy compared with those by which a Repub- 
lican "ring" had looted Philadelphia. 

Slowly the people have learned that corruption has no 
party. The biggest "boss" naturally allies himself with 
whichever party is usually in control in his dis- ..gj 
trict ; but he has a perfect understanding with Business " 
corrupt leaders of the other party, upon whom he ^'p^*'^*'^ 
can call for help against any revolt within his own or- 
ganization, so "playing both ends against the middle." 
The surest weapon at the service of these sly rogues is an 
appeal to the voters to be loyal to the party, — so dividing 
good men and obscuring real issues in local government. 
Nor does one housecleaning and the punishinent of a few 
rascals end the matter. Gains are too great. In a few 
years. New York and Philadelphia were again dominated 
by rings quite as bad as the first ones. With an occa- 
sional spasm of ineffectual reform, such conditions remained 
characteristic of practically every important city until the 
rising of the mighty tide of reform about the opening of 
the new century ; and the fight for clean government is not 
yet won. 

The graduation of corrupted scoundrels from city and 
State politics into National politics was one cause of the 
degradation that befell the latter. But National politics 
had also its own troubles. What a street car company or a 
gas company was to a city council or to a State judiciary, a 
railroad or a Standard Oil Company was to Congress and the 



644 THE PEOPLE VS. PRIVILEGE 

Federal bench. Corporations which wish to keep on good 
terms with the party machinery in State and Nation have 
been the main sources of campaign funds. Usually such a 
corporation has kept on the safe side by contributing to 
both parties, — somewhat more liberally to the one in 
power, from which favors are the more likely to come. 
The immense contributions from such sources have been a 
chief means of political corruption in campaigns. Mean- 
time, the people have to pay these contributions indirectly in 
higher prices, — siyice the amounts are charged up to "oper- 
ating expenses" by the corporations. 

The law of 1911 to compel publicity by the National 
Committees of all political parties as to the source of all 
their funds is helping to correct this evil. In 1912 a 
congressional investigation proved conclusively, by the 
sworn testimony of the heads of the great "trusts," that 
there really had existed a close alliance between certain 
privileged interests and guiding forces in the government, 
such as the general public had only dimly suspected. Mr. 
H. O. Havemeyer, President of the Sugar Trust, was asked 
whether his Trust made political contributions in the 
campaigns. "Yes," he said frankly; "we always do that. 
In New York [controlled by Democrats] we throw [our con- 
tribution] their way. In Massachusetts, where the Repub- 
licans are dominant, they 'have the call.' Wherever there 
is a dominant party . . . that is the party that gets the 
contribution, because it is the party that controls local matters'' 
[election of congressmen, governors. State judges, etc.]. 

This pul)lic corruption does not come in any considerable 
degree from ordinary competitive business. Public corrup- 
Search for ^^^^^ comes from the desire to secure special 
"the man privilege. The public service corporation in the 
ig er up ^j^y j^ ^j^^ source of municipal corruption : the 
ordinary business man, who pays a bribe perhaps to secure 
a city contract, is rather a victim than a first cause. So 
in the Nation, the railroads, with their land grants or 
their desire to evade legal control, and, later, the fattened 
trusts which wish to preserve some tariff "protection," are 



MUNICIPAL CORRUPTION 645 

the source of National corruption. The city or State 
"boss" who "delivers the goods" to these privileged 
corporations seems at first sight the front and substance 
of the corruption ; but, in real fact, he is merely an agent, 
permitted to pay himself in loot, but set in motion and 
protected by "the man higher up," the respectable head 
of great business interests.^ These large interests draw 
after them smaller business men, sometimes by brutal 
coercion, but more commonly by merely playing artfully 
upon the phrase that any attempt at reform "hurts busi- 
ness." Almost every genuine reform movement in America 
so far has found its chief foe, after a brief run, in this des- 
picable phrase. 

' Every American should read Judge Ben B. Lindsey's The Beast and the Jungle, 
— the best and most dramatic portrayal in literature of the truth stated above. 



CHAPTER XLII 

FORWARD-LOOKING MOVEMENTS BEFORE 1917 

The new moral earnestness of 1890, we have said, wan- 
dered blindly for a while. But about 1900, men began 
to see that the first step toward industrial freedom was to 
restore self-government to the people and to enlarge it by 
the enfranchisement of women and through new political 
machinery — the referendum, the initiative, the recall, the 
direct nomination of all elected officials, and the more direct 
control of the Federal courts. The forward-looking move- 
ments treated in this chapter have all placed these matters 
foremost in their immediate programs. 



THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

The ten years preceding the Civil War, with the new 
conveniences for communication and combination, saw a 
Labor few trades organize on a national scale (instead 

organi- Qf {q^ localities only) ; but these first national 

the Civil "unions" were confined to trades whose total 
^^ membership was small. The sixties witnessed a 

remarkable spread of the movement. The Brotherhood 
of Locomotive Engineers organized in 1863, the cigar 
makers in '64, the brickmakers in 'Q5, railway conductors in 
'68, railway firemen in '69 — all strong unions. By 1870 
forty trades had achieved national organization, and the 
movement continued until all skilled trades became so 
organized. Nearly every union has its weekly or monthly 
organ, The Carpenter, The Fireman s Magazine, and so on ; 
and in every large town the Trades' Assembly has a labor 
paper devoted to the general welfare of the movement. 
And, apart from industrial matters, these organizations have 
exerted a notable influence and training. Many a local 

646 



THE LABOR MOVEMENT 647 

"Assembly " conducts its business and debates with a promp- 
titude and skill that would be highly instructive to college 
faculty or State legislature. 

But organization of single trades, even on a national 
scale, was not enough. In 1869 a few workingmen in Phila- 
delphia founded The Noble Order of the Knights Knights of 
of Labor, — to include all workers, skilled or ^^^^t 
unskilled, — with the motto, "The injury of one is the 
concern of all." The strike year of '77 (page 648) popu- 
larized the movement ; and in '78 it held its first National 
Assembly, made up of delegates from local and district 
assemblies. For years this Order exercised vast influence 
for good, and was the fount of much wholesome legislation 
in State and Nation. Especial gratitude is due it for its 
early recognition of the right of women to equal pay with 
men for equal service, and for its hearty welcome to world- 
peace movements ; but it joined the Populists in the Free 
Silver campaigns, and virtually fell with the failure of that 
movement. 

The American Federation of Labor rose, phoenixlike, from 
the ashes of the Knights. Its units are the national unions 
of single trades ; it does not recognize unskilled ^j^^ y^^ier- 
labor in its organization. It counts some two ican 
million men, besides three quarters of a million ^*'<^^'^^**°'^ 
more organized in railway unions and affiliated with it. It 
has encouraged the formation of Trades' Assemblies (the 
"Trades-union" of the thirties) in all large places, composed 
of delegates from the local unions and standing to them 
somewhat as the National Federation stands to the national 
unions. The annual convention and the executive council 
of the American Federation exercise treinendous influence 
over the separate unions, but have no binding power over 
them, — except authority to levy assessments to sustain a 
strike approved by the central council. Samuel Gompers 
has been annually reelected president for some twenty-eight 
years (1920), and has proven himself a notable leader, 
though in more recent years a large and growing element 
regard him as too timid and too conservative. 



648 THE PEOPLE VS. PRIVILEGE 

As with the earher organizations of the thirties, so too 
the modern unions at once asserted hostihty between labor 
The labor and Capital. Said the brickmakers, in the pre- 
war amble to their constitution, in '65 : " Capital has 
assumed the right to own and control labor for its own selfish 
ends." The first violent clash came, naturally, in the rail- 
way world, — because organization on both sides was first 
complete there. The railway panic of '73 led many roads 
to cut wages. The powerful organizations of "skilled" 
engineers and conductors proved able to ward off such re- 
ductions, or at least to secure fair hearing, in most cases, by 
mere threats of a strike ; but the places of firemen and 
switchmen could be filled more easily, and on these classes 
fell the most serious reductions of pay. In '77 the fourth 
cut within five years drove these employees on the Balti- 
more and Ohio to a strike — which spread like a prairie 
blaze to many other roads. 

The strikers sought to prevent the running of freight 
trains. Riot and bloodshed were widespread, from Balti- 
more to San Francisco. Pittsburg was in the hands of a mob 
for days. The crowds of idle and desperate men in the cities 
and the thousands of "tramps" in the country (both new 
features in American life with the '73 panic) added to the 
violence and disorder. Millions on millions of dollars of 
railway property were destroyed, and the injury to private 
business was much more disastrous. Violence was finally 
repressed, and peaceful strikers sometimes intimidated, by 
Federal troops. On the whole, however, the strikers won 
important concessions. 

Of the many tens of thousands of strikes during the next 
forty years that marked the war, so opened, between labor 
The Pull- ^^^ capital, only two may be noted here, though 
man strike many others were of national interest. In 1894 
of 1894 ^j^^ employees of the Pullman Car Company struck 
to avoid reduction of wages. The American Railway Union, 
sympathizing with the strikers, demanded that the quarrel 
be submitted to arbitration. The Company refused, and 
the Union refused to handle Pullman cars on any road. 



THE LABOR MOVEMENT 649 

Twenty-three leading roads were involved. The companies 
had contracts, in most cases at least, making them liable 
for damages if they did not use these cars ; and, apart from 
this fact, they were bitterly resolved to crush the "sym- 
pathetic strike" idea. 

The disorders extended from Cincinnati to San Francisco ; 
but Chicago was the storm center. Hundreds of freight cars 
were looted and burned by the city mob, which found its 
opportunity for plunder in the situation ; and the loss and 
crime were charged upon the strikers by many respectable 
elements of society. The governor of Illinois (Altgeld) 
sympathized with the strike, and declared that the railway 
companies were paralyzed, not by strike violence, but by a 
legitimate situation, since they could not secure men to run 
their cars without Federal assistance. President Cleve- 
land, however, broke the strike by sending Federal troops 
to Chicago to insure the running of trains — on the ground of 
preventing interference with the United States mails, and 
of putting down "conspiracies" which interfered with inter- 
state commerce. The business interests of the country 
heartily indorsed the President's action, but that action 
was one of the chief reasons why the more radical wing of 
Democrats was driven into opposition (page 607, note). 

In May, 1902, the coal miners of Pennsylvania struck 
for an increase of wages and the recognition of their union. 
The strike lasted five months and caused a general ^j^^ ^^jq 
coal famine. John Mitchell, the head of the strike of 
miners' union, by his admirable handling of the 
situation, won recognition as one of the ablest men America 
has produced. The operators, consisting of a few rail- 
way presidents who enjoyed a complete monopoly of the 
anthracite coal trade, lost public sympathy by an insane 
"divine right" claim from Mr. Baer, one of the presidents, 
that the public ought to be content to leave the matter to 
"the Christian men to whom God, in his infinite ^^^ 
wisdom, has given the control of the 'property inter- Theodore 
ests of the country." Finally President Roose- 
velt brought operators and John Mitchell into conference 



650 THE PEOPLE VS. PRIVILEGE 

(October 3) . Mitchell offered to submit his case to a board of 
arbitrators to be appointed by the President, and promised 
that the miners would return to work at once, without wait- 
ing for the investigation, if such a course should be agreed 
to ; but the operators refused arbitration, and called loudly on 
the President for troops. Privately, Roosevelt determined 
instead "to send in the United States army to take posses- 
sion of the coal fields" for the nation, if necessary; but, 
two weeks later, he succeeded in bringing the mine owners 
to time through J. Pierpont Morgan, the financial backer 
of the coal trust. Then the owners agreed to arbitration. 
Five months later (March, 1903), the board of arbitrators 
made its report, sustaining the demands of the miners in 
almost every point. The action of President Roosevelt 
was acclaimed by the sympathizers of labor everywhere as 
a happy contrast to the action of Cleveland nine years 
before at Chicago. Incidentally it is well to note that the 
mining companies simply added to the price of coal much 
more than the arbitration had cost them. 

During the Pullman strike (July 2, 1894), a Federal 
District Court issued a "blanket injunction," ordering 
Government ^^^ members of the American Railway Union to 
by in- cease interfering with the business of the twenty- 

junction ^j^j.^^ j.^^^g (^p^gg Q^gy Eugene V. Debs, presi- 
dent of the Union, continued to manage the strike, and, 
two weeks later, was arrested for contempt of court. In- 
vestigation of the charge did not take place for several 
months — - during which Debs remained in jail rather 
than ask for bail on such a charge — and then he was 
condemned to six months' imprisonment. In effect Debs 
was punished by a year's imprisonment for an act which no 
legislature or jury had ever declared a crime, and he was de- 
prived of his constitutional privilege of a jury trial. The 
principle was not new; but this sort of "court government 
by injunction" came into new prominence by this incident.^ 

* Debs was already under charge of violating the laws regulating interstate 
commerce ; but on a trial for this offense he would have had a jury. The action 



THE LABOR MOVEMENT 651 

Organized labor at once made resistance to "government by 
injunction" one of its cardinal principles. In 1912 an 
"anti-injunction bill" passed the lower House of Congress, 
but failed in the Senate. Such a bill did become law in the 
administration of Woodrow Wilson, but in recent months, 
in the period of reaction since the war, it has been rendered 
void by court interpretation. 

Society must awaken not only to the wrongs of labor but 
to its own loss in all "labor war." It foots the bills in every 
strike. What the employer loses is quickly made j^abor war 
good to him by increased prices to the public, and the 
What the laborer loses is added largely to the ^"^^*^ 
cost of prisons and asylums paid by the public. Even 
while the strike is in progress, the "innocent bystander" 
often suffers as bitterly as the combatants — just as the 
burghers of a medieval city often found their daily market- 
ing interrupted, and sometimes had heads broken or houses 
burned, in the private wars between lawless barons in their 
streets. Society must continue to suffer such ills, as medi- 
eval society did, until it becomes resolute to compel justice 
on both sides. (During the World War, the Nation did 
this through its great "War Labor Board," but that fine 
example has now been allowed to perish.) 

Public sympathy is effectually alienated from either side 
that is known to use violence. The unions know this ; and, 
from policy and principle, they commonly do their strikes 
best to prevent disorder. When the more desper- ^^^ violence 
ate and ill-controlled strikers, or their sympathizers, do use 
violence, well-to-do society promptly calls for troops and 
declares that "now the time for considering the wrongs of 
labor has gone : it remains only to restore order." Certainly, 
order must be maintained : but the fundamental evil in the 
matter lies in the fact that for the people who use this 

of the court deprived him of this right, and removed all the securities of the ordinary 
law. Says Davis R. Dewey, — the practice tended to make "the courts no 
longer judicial, but a part of the executive branch of the government," and even- 
tually to make "the judiciary either tyrannical or contemptible" {National Prob- 
lems, 296). 



652 THE PEOPLE VS. PRIVILEGE 

argument most glibly, " the time for considering the wrongs of 
labor" has never arrived. The unions assert, too, that some- 
times the employers hire ruflSans to destroy their own prop- 
erty in order to represent such destruction as the work of 
strikers ; and that armies of thugs in the pay of the employers 
as private policemen often intentionally force a riot by "beat- 
ing up" peaceable strikers and by grossly insulting women 
and children. It is proven fact that some of the largest 
industrial corporations maintain an extensive spy system 
among their employees ; and, to earn their pay, the wretched 
spies foment strikes and more serious plots. 

The prospect brightens somewhat when we turn to the 
gains that labor has won through peaceful influence upon 
legislation. 

1. After the Civil War, the eight-hour day ^ took the place 

in labor agitation which the ten-hour day had held thirty 

years before, and in 1868 Congress adopted the 

Gains for • • i p 1 1 i i i i i • i i i 

labor: the pmiciplc lor ail labor employed directly by the 
eight-hour government. Many States and municipalities 
have followed this example for public loorks; and 
in 1912 Congress enacted that the principle should apply 
to all work done for the government by contractors as 
well as to work done directly by its own employees. Various 
skilled unions, too, have secured the eight-hour day by custom. 
State legislation regarding the labor day, except on public 
work, had always been nullified by the courts, until within a 
few years, on the ground that such legislation interferes 
with "freedom of contract." In 1895 in Illinois, and in 1911 
in New York, laws to shorten the working day even for women 
were thrown out by the courts on that same ground. Re- 
ferring to this New York decision, in a speech in New York 
in November, 1911, Theodore Roosevelt said: — 

^ "We mean to make things over: we're tired of toil for nought 
But bare enough to live on : never an hour for thought. 
We want to feel the sunshine; we want to smell the flowers; 
We're sure that (lod has willed it, and we mean to have eight hours. 
We're summoning our forces from shipyard, shop, and mill : 
Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will !" 

— J. G. Blanchard. 



I 



THE LABOR MOVEMENT 653 

"I am asking you to declare une(iui vocally that it is for the 
people themselves to say whether or not this policy [a shorter 
labor day] shall be adopted, and that no body of officials, no matter 
how well meaning, nor personally honest, no matter whether they 
be legislators, judges, or executives, have any right to say that w^e, 
the people, shall not make laws to protect women and children, to 
protect men in hazardous industry, to protect men, women, and 
children from working under unhealthy conditions or for manifestly 
excessive hours, and to prevent the conditions of life in tenement 
houses from becoming intolerable. ... I do believe that this 
people must ultimately control its own destinies, and cannot 
surrender the right of ultimate control to a judge any more than 
to a legislator or an executive." 

And under the compulsion of public opinion, the courts 
in these same States soon reversed their earlier decisions, 
finding sanction for so doing in the "police powers of the 
State," — to maintain a reasonable standard of health and 
public welfare. Then in 1917, the Federal Supreme Court, 
democratized in part by Woodrow Wilson's appointments, 
declared constitutional (1) a California law fixing eight hours 
as the maximum working day for women ; (2) an Oregon 
law fixing a ten-hour maximum day for Tnen; and (3) an 
Oregon law establishing the principle of a ^'minimum wage"" 
for woman, a "living wage" such as to insure health and 
decency.^ 

2. It has been easier to secure liinitation of the working day 
for children than for adults, because public sympathy was 
more easily aroused and because the common law 
did not "protect" children by the "freedom of con- 
tract" rule. In 1874 and 1879 Massachusetts, through the 
influence of organized labor and of the Labor Bureau's statis- 
tics, made the first efficient provision in America for limitation 
of hours of labor for ivomen and children (ten hours a day), 
with adequate inspection to enforce the law. During the 

^ This last decision — long the hope of radical reformers — was determined 
largely by the conclusive arguments prepared by Louis Brandeis shortly before his 
appointment to the Supreme Court. Under these circiunstances, Justice Brandeis, 
of course, did not sit in the court when the case was tried. 



654 THE PEOPLE VS. PRIVILEGE 

next decade, this example was followed, for children at least, 
in most of the manufacturing States of that day ; and there 
has been further legislation prohibiting all employment of 
children of school age — at least until a certain proficiency 
in studies had been attained. 

Between 1880 and 1890 the number of children in manu- 
facturing establishments fell off a third ; but after 1890, the 
In the numbers increased once more, with the growth of 

South factories in the South — where proper regulation 

of this crime against youth remained sadly lacking. Labor 
organizations at once expressed desire to coerce these negli- 
gent States by Federal law forbidding railways to transport 
goods produced by child labor. Authority for such legisla- 
tion was claimed under the power of Congress to regulate 
commerce ; but when such an act was at last passed, in 
1916, it was promptly declared void by the Supreme Court. 
The same end, however, was reached in 1918 by a child- 
labor amendment to a federal tax law, but there is still great 
need of State legislation in the South. 

3. A scientific investigation of labor conditions by State 
and Federal governments, together with publicity of the 
Labor findings, has been one of the wisest demands of 
Bureaus labor. In 1869 a Labor Reform party secured a 
State Bureau of Labor Statistics in Massachusetts. In the 
eighties the Knights of Labor secured such a bureau in the 
Federal government and in many States. Most of the States 
now have such departments, usually headed by labor repre- 
sentatives and charged with authority to enforce factory 
legislation. By 1913 the Federal Bureau had grown into 
the Department of Labor. In 1912, too, the government 
created the Children s Bureau to promote child welfare. 

4. Factory acts have been adopted in nearly all the States, 
requiring employers to "fence" dangerous machinery, to 

arrange for escape from possible fire, and to pro- 
vide adequate ventilation and freedom from 
dampness and from extreme temperatures. Such legisla- 



THE LABOR MOVEMENT 655 

tion is enforced through inspection by the State Labor 
Bureaus. 

5. Compensation to ivorkmen for injuries received in the 
course of their toil has made much progress. The Common 
Law permitted an employee to recover by a suit workmen s 
for damages. The cost, however, was too great Compensa- 
for poor men in any but the gravest cases ; and if ^^°^ ^'^^^ 
the accident was caused by the carelessness of a "fellow 
servant," no recovery was possible. Happily, many of the 
States, by employers' liability laws, have abolished this last 
principle, and some of them have made compensation al- 
most automatic — by State insurance, without the interven- 
tion of legal processes — though in others there remains 
much to be done in this line. A model law has been adopted 
by the Federal government for railroad employees engaged 
in interstate commerce and (1916) for all Federal employees. 

When the practice becomes general, compensation for ac- 
cidents will become an item in the general expense account 
of all factories, — part of the operating expenses, — and 
will be paid, as it should be, by society, in the price of the 
goods. At the same time, each employer will have an 
inducement to precautions, since, by reducing accidents 
below the average, he will add to his profits. 

In this matter America, with its constitutional protection 
to property interests, still lags far behind several European 
lands. No other industrial country needs such legislation 
as much as America. No other one has so large a proportion 
of preventable accidents. In our coal mines alone, in 1908, 
three thousand men were killed and ten thousand injured. 
The family wreckage that goes with such loss of life by the 
breadwinners is even more appalling. Unless this slaughter 
is checked by law, or by greater sense of responsibility in 
employers, American industry threatens to become more 
wasteful of human life and social welfare than ancient war 
was. 

Closely related to one of these forward steps is a gain 
made recently under threat of strike. In March of 1916, the 



656 



THE PEOPLE VS. PRIVILEGE 



four great railway "brotherhoods" (conductors, engineers, 
trainmen, and firemen) began an earnest agitation for "an 
eight-hour day, with pay-and-a-half for over- 
time." ^ After various fruitless conferences with 
railroad managers, the men voted (94 per cent of 
the 400,000 members of the brotherhoods) to 
give their "heads" authority to call a nation-wide strike if 
the managers persisted. The nation was alarmed. There 



The eight- 
hour rail- 
way law 
of 1916 




Harris and Ewing, Washington, D. C. 



Watching the Procession of the American Federation of Labor at its 
meeting in 1916. From left to right the figures are President Wilson, Samuel 
Gompers, and Secretary Wilson of the Department of Labor. 

seemed no doubt that the brotherhoods could tie up the 
transportation of the country completely ; and that would 
mean ruin to business and starvation to the city poor. 
The managers offered to arbitrate : the men were willing 

' The railroad managers insisted that this really meant not shorter hours but 
an increase of $10,000,000 a year in wages. The men declared they were after 
shorter hours, and that they asked extra pay for overtime mainly to compel the 
roads to arrange eight-hour schedules. 



THE LABOR MOVEMENT 657 

to arbitrate as to pay for overtime, but not as to the 
eight-hour day. President Wilson now called the "heads" 
and the railway managers into consultation ; but many 
days of conference brought no result. The President then 
made a public statement of his position: "I have recom- 
mended the concession of the eight-hour day — that is, 
the substitution of an eight-hour day for the present ten- 
hour day in all the existing practices and agreements. I 
made this recommendation because I believe the conces- 
sion right. The eight-hour day now undoubtedly has 
the sanction of the judgment of society in its favor, and 
should be adopted as a basis for wages even where the 
actual work to be done cannot be completed within eight 
hours. . . ." The roads, the President continued, might 
or might not be entitled to increase rates to the public : 
only time could show what adjustments would be necessary. 
Accordingly, he recommended that the men postpone their 
demand regarding increased pay for overtime. 

The men accepted the President's plan, but the managers 
refused it. The strike was set for an hour only some six 
days off. But Congress, under the President's leadership, 
hastily enacted an eight-hour law for all interstate com- 
merce. The whole matter was a leading issue at the elec- 
tion in November, when the President was given a second 
term ; and in the following March the law was upheld by 
the Supreme Court. 

The "closed shop" has been a chief aim of labor unions 
in many strikes and boycotts. Labor unionists believe that 
they must have "collective bargaining" if labor ^j^^ 
is to deal with capital on anything like equal " closed 
terms : the individual laborer must accept any ^^°^ 
terms offered him. Accordingly, members of a union con- 
tend that every worker in their trade must be persuaded, or 
forced, to join the union or leave the industry. The man 
who stays out gets whatever better conditions may be se- 
cured by collective bargaining, without giving his help 
toward it; and, in time of trial, he becomes a traitor to 



658 THE PEOPLE VS. PRIVILEGE 

the cause of labor by underbidding the union standard. 
On the other hand, many hberal-minded people look upon 
the principle of the closed shop as "un-American." It is 
easily designated as tyranny toward the individual laborer, 
who is no longer "permitted" to work "on his own terms." 
Sometimes, too, a strike against a fair employer who himself 
recognizes union labor, but who has contracts with firms 
that do not, involves serious injustice ; and the courts now 
declare such " compound " strikes illegal. 

The unions fall often into the hands of self-seeking leaders, 
or of treacherous ones, and are used to bad ends ; and 
the most sincere leaders are no more beyond possibility 
of error, in their puzzling duties, than other men are. 
But the sins of organized labor, while often more violent, 
are usually less dangerous to human progress, than the sins 
of organized capital, which commonly provoke them. From 
labor's viewpoint, talk by a "scab" of his individual "right" 
to bargain his own labor is as muqh out of place as like 
vaporings by a deserter in war. The "unionist" feels that 
organized labor is the only hope for better conditions of 
life for the masses of mankind. 

Employers' associations often charge organized labor 
bitterly with that sort of sabotage which consists in limiting 
production by "loafing on the job." But it is a question 
whether the blame does not rest at least as much upon the 
employers, since they direct the system of industry. Labor 
does loaf. It has lost interest in "piling up profits — for 
the bosses." To restore interest, to supply incentive, 
higher wages are of less avail than a rieic movement to de- 
mocratize industry. Wide-awake employers here and there 
are finding it pay to admit their workmen not only to a 
share in profits, but also, through elected councils, to a 
share in the management and to a partial ownership in their 
jobs — so that they and their families may not at a moment's 
notice be plunged into misery by the chance whim of an 
employer or of a tyrannical foreman. Recently the Catholic 
Church has approved such a program for industry, and 
other religious organizations have gone far on the same road. 



THE FARMER MOVEMENT 659 

THE FARMER AND THE NON-PARTISAN LEAGUE 

In recent decades the farmer has made great progress in 
increasing production — in making two blades of grass grow 
where one grew before, to the world's great gain — but very 
little progress in marketing his produce to his own gain. 
True, many farmers are finally able to "retire" with a small 
competence from the increase in value of their land, and occa- 
sionally one even makes money from his crops, either through 
unusual ability or luck. But many investigations show 
beyond dispute that, in spite of his long day of fourteen or 
fifteen hours of strenuous toil and his life of stern privation 
and denial, the average farmer, especially in the Northwest, 
gets less return for his labor than the average hired farm 
hand — to say nothing of city labor. Farmers are learning 
that they have been selling their produce for less than the 
cost of production — if they figure the labor of themselves 
and their family at anything like the price of town labor. 
This is the fundamental reason why, in spite of much noisy 
*'back-to-the-farm" propaganda, the drift from farm to city 
grows steadily toward a national menace. 

About 1900 the conviction began to spread in the grain- 
growing states that the farmer's lack of profits was due to 
unreasonable profits by an unreasonable number of middle- 
men, and more specifically, to undue control by millers and 
by grain men in the wheat pits of the great markets (1) over 
manipulation of grain grading ^ at the elevators, (2) over 
price-fixing in the monopolistic and speculative markets, 

1 The Minneapolis elevators every year ship out hundreds of thousands of 
bushels of high-grade wheat more than they take in, and the same number of bushels 
of low-grade wheat less than they take in. On grain originally graded low, the 
farmer gets merely a trifle. This tremendous change of market value is brought 
about partly by skillful shuffling : the elevator mixes a very little No. 1 with a 
large amount of No. 2 (No. 2 that is already almost No. 1), and so can pass the whole 
as No. 1 without materially changing the food value. The grain men will say, truly 
enough, that a larger part of the change is due to the fact that passing grain through 
the elevator makes it grade higher (gives it brighter color and somewhat better 
quality). But if "no grade" wheat is so cheaply made high grade, then plainly 
the farmer is robbed by the very great difference in price between the two grades 
when he sells. The loss in a grain State runs up into millions of dollars a year. 



660 THE PEOPLE VS. PRIVILEGE 

and (3) through their position on big bank directorates, over 
the credit extended to or withdrawn from farmers by the 
dependent country banks — a control susceptible of use to 
compel the farmer to sell his grain when the market is lowest. 
So arose demands for State-owned elevators and flour mills. 
State banks to extend rural credits, and such other matters 
as State hail insurance. Finally, when business interests 
had long shown themselves heedless or obdurate, these de- 
mands were taken up by a new farmers' organization in 
North Dakota, led by Arthur C. Townley. 

The Non-Partisan League is a political organization with 
a specific program for reform, but it is not a political party. 
As the name implies, it means to use the machinery of 
either political party through which it can best attain its 
aims. In the Northwest, this is commonly the Republican 
party, but in Montana, where the Democrats are usually 
dominant, the League has sought to utilize that party. 
For five years (1915-1920) the Non-Partisans have controlled 
North Dakota and have put much of their program into 
effect. Business interests, both in the State and in neigh- 
boring grain centers like Minneapolis and Duluth, have 
fought them fiercely, and have attempted to discredit their 
program as "Socialism" and as unconstitutional. But in 
the summer of 19'20 the Supreme Court of the United States 
declared constitutional the laws most in dispute — for 
State banks, State elevators, and State flour mills. This 
decision marks another milestone in the growth of American 
law and establishes the right of the State to go into business 
when its citizens think such action needful for their well- 
being. (Cf. page 631.) 

SOCIALISTS AND SINGLE TAXERS 

While the Labor Union was appealing to skilled workers. 
Socialism made rapid converts among unskilled laborers 
Growth of on the streets and among students in the closet, 
SociaUsm until it became a force to be reckoned with in 
American life. 



GROWTH OF SOCIALISM G61 

Modern Socialism points out that a few capitalists prac- 
tically control the means of producing wealth ("the ma- 
chinery of production and transportation"). This, they 
argue, is the essential evil in industrial conditions. Their 
remedy is to have society step into the place of those feio, taking 
over the ownership and management (1) of land, wherever 
practicable, including especially mines, water power, and 
other natural resources, (2) of transportation and com- 
munication, and (3) of all large-scale production. Private 
ownership for private enjoyment and consumption, they claim, 
would then regulate itself without injury to the common life. 

A radical faction of Socialists, losing faith in political 
methods, has split off into a distinct organization in favor of 
"direct action." By this they do not mean, most _ , 

. The I.W.W. 

of them, the use of bombs and bullets in place of 
ballots, but they do mean the compulsion of society by in- 
dustrial pressure — as finally by "general strikes." As a 
means to success, they work first for the organization of 
great masses of labor, unskilled as well as skilled, into 
"one big union." This program, first put forward by the 
French "Syndicalists," has been adopted in America by 
the "Industrial Workers of the World" ("I.W.W. "). "Poor 
work for poor pay," an early slogan, passed with these ad- 
vocates of industrial war quickly into more serious forms 
of sabotage, such as ruining machinery and spoiling raw 
material. Society, in turn, alarmed and angered, instead 
of punishing merely for such crimes when committed, has 
many times allowed these agitators to claim the cloak of 
martyrs, by refusing them the ordinary privileges of free 
speech. Certainly, the un-American and despotic action of 
the New York Assembly, in 1920, in twice expelling five 
Socialists, duly elected, merely upon the ground that they 
were Socialists ("political" Socialists, not I.W.W.) has done 
more to make new I.W.W. than all repressive measures 
have done to check the movement. It has seemed to great 
numbers of workers to justify the I.W.W. argument that 
the ballot is of no use. 

Unhappily, the leaders of the Socialist party in America 



662 THE PEOPLE VS. PRIVILEGE 

were largely of German or Austrian birth ; and when 
America entered the war for democracy against Germany, 
in 1917, the Socialist party as an organization, under color 
of opposing all war, took a distinctly disloyal position. 
This fact not only arrayed that party against progress : 
it also cast discredit upon the whole Socialistic program. 
Moreover, for a time at least, it resulted in driving from 
the organization many of its most promising leaders, like 
SociaUsts Charles Edward Russell and Upton Sinclair, 
and the (Said Mr. Russell, when the party cast him out, 
World War — ^ << j ^^^ ^^^ ^^^ convinced that I cannot be 

both a Socialist and an American ; but if I have to choose, 
I choose to be an American.") Thinkers revolt, too, against 
the "tyranny" seemingly inseparable from state socialism. 

In 1879 Henry George published Progress and Poverty. 
This brilliant book, to its converts, transformed "the dismal 
Henry science" of political economy into a religion of 

George hope. George teaches that land values are a 
social product created by the growth of population. Society 
therefore should take them by taxing land up to the rental 
value of unimproved land equal in location and quality. 
This taxation would include, of course, the full value of 
the use of city streets to transportation companies and 
lighting companies, and of railroad right-of-way — unless 
the public chooses to keep such enterprises wholly in its own 
hands. Thus taxation would reach all "natural monopolies." 

The advocates believe that such a tax would exceed 
present public expenditure and make other taxation unnec- 
And the essary. Therefore it is styled the ''Single Tax.'' 
Single Tax Other taxation, it is urged, "penalizes industry." 
The Single Tax takes from the individual only what he has 
never earned (the "unearned increment"), and takes for 
society only what society has created. Incidentally, it 
would put an end to mischievous speculation in land — 
since no one could then afford to hold land, unused, for a 
rise — and it would certainly prevent many forms of vicious 
special privilege. Indeed, its converts usually hold that all 



MORE DIRECT DEMOCRACY G63 

special privilege runs back to private ownership of land 
values. Apart from the question of exact economic truth, 
the Single Tax doctrine has been one of the inspiring forces 
of the century. Progress and Poverty was a trumpet call 
for eager youth with faith in humanity to rally to a contest 
for truth which should make men free. 

Socialists believe in public ownership of all the means 
of production, including machinery : Single-Taxers believe 
in public ownership only of all natural monopolies. The 
Socialists agree to the doctrines of the Single Tax, but do 
not think it goes far enough. The Single-Taxer denounces 
socialism as tyrannical, and believes that, granted the Single 
Tax, individualism may safely rule all other social relations. 

THE "PROGRESSIVE" MOVEMENT IN POLITICS 

In the Jacksonian period, three generations ago, Amer- 
ican democracy triumphed in theory over all enemies. But 
real political practice fell far short of true democracy. The 
new machinery which was devised for Jacksonian democ- 
racy made the people's rule too indirect. It suited better 
the secret rule of Privilege. It was particularly fitted for 
the skillful manipulation of "bosses," the agents of Privilege. 

About 1900, the conviction grew among political reform- 
ers that the first need of our Republic was more direct de- 
mocracy, with less power in "political middle- 
men" — direct nominations by the people in place for more 
of indirect by bargaining conventions ; a direct ^^^^'^^ 
check upon officials after election by the recall ; 
direct legislation by the initiative and referendum ; direct 
''home rule" for cities, in place of indirect rule at the State 
capital ; direct election of United States Senators ; and a 
direct voice by women in the government. 

This need of more democratic political machinery was 
to be met, in the early stages, almost wholly by State action, 
not by National law. It was fortunate that such And the 
could be the case. One State moved faster for states 
direct legislation ; another State, for woman suffrage ; while 



664 



THE PEOPLE VS. PRIVILEGE 



those States which did not move in anj^ matter, and which 
might have had drag enough to prevent any movement in 
the beginning in a consolidated nation, had at least to look 
on with interest while their more far-sighted or more reck- 
less neighbors acted as political experiment stations. 

For many years after the Civil War, the State seemed in 
danger of sinking into a disused organ — a sort of vermiform 
appendix in the body politic. But now the State re- 
awakened, — and, with it, new hope for democracy. In 
1900, after years of splendid conflict under the leadership of 




The Minnesota Capitol at St. Paul. From a photograph. 



Robert La Follette, Wisconsin began to shake off the rule of 
bosses and machine politics, to control railroads, and to 
build a truly democratic commonwealth, with her great 
university for her training school in politics and in nobler 
living. Then, led by William Uren, Oregon adopted demo- 
cratic machinery that outran anything before known in 
America. Oklahoma began its statehood with most of 
the democratic devices known at the time, and with some 
novel experiments, in its first constitution. And the State 
elections of 1910 and 1911 witnessed brilliant progress all 
the way from the redemption of corporation-ridden New 



MORE DIRECT DEMOCRACY 665 

Jersey by Woodrow Wilson (page 639) to the redemption 
of Southern-Pacific-ridden California by Hiram Johnson, 
with tlie adoption of nearly all the democratic machinery 
indicated above in several States. 

The Australian ballot ^ was the first of these reforms to 
win general acceptance. Under earlier practice, the parties 
and candidates printed tickets in any form they ^j^^ 
liked, often with deceptive labels or with fraudu- Australian 
lent changes of one or more names. Thoughtful * °* 
voters, who wished to vote independently of party labels, 
found it difficult to do so ; and a purchased voter received 
his ballot from the bribe-giver, who watched him deposit it. 

Henry George (page 662) began the American agitation for 
the Australian ballot in 1886 in New York. In 1887 a 
bill for the reform was defeated in the legislature ; and three 
years later, when public opinion compelled the old parties to 
grant the measure, they managed for a while to deceive the 
people with a sham. The New York ballot of 1890 did 
secure secrecy ; but it encouraged straight party voting by 
arranging that one mark at the head of a ticket should stand 
for all the candidates of the party selected. Five years 
later, however, New York secured the true reform ballot, 
and by 1914 it was in use in 46 of the 48 States. 

Good election machinery, however, is not enough. Good 
nomination machinery is quite as important. The people 
must have a fair chance to express their will in Direct 
selecting the candidates between whom the final primaries 
choice must be made. This is the aim of a movement for 
"direct primaries." 

Under the old system of nominating caucuses and con- 
ventions, rarely did a tenth of the voters take any part in 
nominations. The matter was left to the political 
"machines." Or, if a popular contest did take place, the 
result was often determined by fraud or trickery or by 
absolute violence. In 1897 the young Robert M. La Follette 

1 The system is essentially the English ballot system of 1870, which had been 
improved in some measure in some of the Australian states. 



666 THE PEOPLE VS. PRIVILEGE 

of Wisconsin, smarting under undeserved defeat in boss- 
owned nominating conventions, worked out a complete 
system of "direct primaries" for State and Nation, and 
began to agitate for its adoption. In 1901 Minnesota 
adopted the plan, and it is now in force in nearly half the 
States. 

More significant than choice of officials is direct control 
by the people over the laws which officials are to carry out. 
Direct As a rulc, eveu in "democracies, "the people have 

legislation governed themselves only indirectly. They have 
chosen representatives ; and these delegated individuals 
have made the laws, — sometimes with little response to 
popular desires. Radical democrats demand that the peo- 
ple take a more direct and effective part in lawmaking by 
the referendum and the initiative. 

The referendum is the older device. It consists merely in 
referring to a popular vote for final confirmation a law which 
The ref- has already passed the legislature or the State 
erendum convention. The practice originated in Massa- 
chusetts in the ratification of the State constitution, in 
1778 and 1780 (page 219). Since 1820 it has been used 
almost always in our States for the ratification of new 
constitutions or constitutional amendments ; and there has 
been a growing tendency to submit to popular vote also, in 
State or city, questions of liquor licensing, bond issues, and 
public ownership. For more than a half century, Switzer- 
land has carried the practice much further. There a certain 
number of voters by petition may compel the legislature 
to submit any law to popular decision. 

Switzerland also developed the true complement to .the 
referendum ; namely, the initiative. By 1870, in nearly all 
The popular the cantoiis, a small number of voters could frame 
initiative any law they desired, which the legislature then 
was compelled to submit to a popular vote ; ^ and in 1891 
this principle was adopted for the Swiss federal government. 

^ This device also originated in America in Revolutionary days, in a provision 
for amending the constitution of Georgia, but it took no real root at that time. 



MORE DIRECT DEMOCRACY 667 

The profitable working of these devices in Switzerland led 
to a new enthusiasm for them in America ; and by 1905 they 
had become among the most prominent matters on pro- 
gressive platforms. In many Western States they are 
already in force. Mr. William Uren, in an address before 
the City Club of Chicago in 1909, described their working 
in Oregon and their educational value, as follows : — 

• "By the initiative . . . eight per cent of the voters are authorized 
to file with the secretary of state, not less than four months before 
a general election, their petition demanding the reference to the 

people of any measure The full text of the measure must 

be included in the petition, and one petition will take only one 
measure. 

" The referendum provides that five per cent of the voters, at any 
time within ninety days after the close of a session of the legis- 
lature, may file their petition demanding the submission of any 
measure passed by that legislature. The law is thereby held up 
until the next election. It does not take effect until it has been 
voted on and affirmed by the people; and the vote required is a 
majority of those who vote on the question. 

"Our law for the operation of the initiative and referendum 
was amended in 1907, providing that the secretary of state should 
order to be printed and distributed by mail to every registered voter, 
about three months before the election, a copy of all the measures 
that were submitted, and all the arguments that were offered for and 
against them, principally at the expense of the State. Those 
offering arguments are required to pay the actual cost of the 
paper, printing, and press work used for their arguments, but not 
for the measure, so that it costs [the State] about seventy-five 
dollars a printed page for argument. It made a book of a hundred 
and twenty pages last year, and the people read it.'' 

The "recall" provides that a certain percentage of voters, 
on petition, can at any time force any official to stand for 
election again in opposition to some new candi- 
date.^ The advantage of the arrangement over 
waiting for a new election in one or two years, — or several 
years, in case of judicial oflficers, — is that it concentrates 

^ An early American precedent for the "recall" is mentioned on page 245. 



()68 THE PEOPLE VS. PRIVILEGE 

attention upon the one officiaL At a regular election, the 
matter is complicated by party issues and by the distrac- 
tions due to choosing many other oflBcials. Opponents of 
the recall fear that the people will use the power hastily, 
especially in pique toward judicial officers without due 
understanding of the technical points involved in judicial 
decisions that have offended. The reply, of course, is that 
if the people are fit to choose untried men to decide such 
technical points, they must be fit to choose whether th^y 
will keep such men after trial. Presumably, when the peo- 
ple possess this power, it will not have to be invoked often. 
So far, it has not been abused (1920), and in several cases 
its use has done much good. 

In 1906 Oregon adopted a constitutional amendment 
making every elective officer in the State subject to "recall." 
In 1908, when Arizona applied for Statehood, she placed a 
like provision in her constitution. Statehood was delayed 
for some time on this account. Finally in the summer of 
1911 a bill for admission passed Congress with a provision 
requiring the territory first to vote once more upon this 
clause of the proposed constitution. President Taft vetoed 
this bill, and, at his insistence. Statehood was offered only 
on condition that the people of Arizona should first vote 
down the recall provision. This was done in December, 
1911 ; but, at the same time, all the political leaders of the 
territory proclaimed in advance that. Statehood once 
secured, they would work to restore the recall to the con- 
stitution. This threat was made good in 1912. 

Meantime, President Taft's attempt to force a whole 
people into stultifying itself awoke wide popular indignation, 
especially in the progressive West. In the fall of 1911, 
Washington placed the recall in its constitution for all 
oflBcers except the judiciary, and California, by a vote of 
three to one, adopted an amendment for the recall, including 
application to judges. 

For many years there was an unmistakable demand by 
a great majority of the people for an amendment to the 



MORE DIRECT DEMOCRACY 669 

National Constitution to provide for direct election of Sena- 
tors. Time after time the necessary resolution passed the 
Representatives, only to be smothered or voted Direct 
down in the upper House, which had no desire to election of 
be brought closer to the popular will. Then the ^®'^**'"'^ 
people began to reach their end, indirectly, by State action. 
Again Oregon led the way. In 1904 (and again in 1908 by 
a vote of 4 to 1), that State (1) provided that when a 
United States Senator was to be chosen, the voters, at the 
election of the legislature, might express their choice for 
Senator ; and (2) ordered all members of the legislature to 
obey the choice so indicated. This plan spread swiftly, 
and by 1911 it was in force in nearly half the States, 

Then the reformers turned again to Congress for nation- 
wide and more direct action, this time successfully. The 
immediate occasion was a notorious purchase of a senator- 
ship from Illinois by "big business" for a certain Mr. 
Lorimer. True, a Senate committee of "Stand-patters" 
made the usual whitewashing report on the case ; but that 
report was riddled piteously by the Insurgents and by the 
progressive press. Still on the vote to expel, the Stand- 
patters managed to rally the one-third vote necessary to 
save their colleague. A resolution for an amendment to 
provide for popular election of Senators was then pending, 
and it was soon after defeated by almost precisely the same 
vote. But in the spring came a special session of the new 
Congress with large progressive gains ; and, in 1912, Lorimer 
was expelled and the amendment passed. Once more had 
the "wrath of men" worked for righteousness. 

Just before the Civil War, and during that great struggle, 
there was strenuous agitation for a Woman Suffrage amend- 
ment to the National Constitution. The more votes for 
ardent advocates of the measure, like Susan B. women 
Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Julia Ward Howe, 
had already christened their proposal "the Thirteenth amend- 
ment"; but they were finally presuaded to withdraw pres- 
sure for their cause, temporarily, to make the way easier 



670 THE PEOPLE VS. PRIVILEGE 

for the amendments relating to the Negro. Up to this 
time the United States had led the world in the "women 
movement," but during the long decadence that followed 
the Civil War, that movement all but slumbered. With 
the revival of moral earnestness about 1890, the "equal 
suffrage" cause shared in the general uplift. Earnest 
efforts were promptly begun once more for the "Susan B. 
Anthony" amendment, but the earlier victories came, as 
in most of these democratic reforms, through State action. 
As with the other democratic reforms, too, the early victo- 
ries came in the West. 

The first State to grant the . ballot to women on full 
equality ^ with men was Wyoming at its admission in 1890. 
(The Territory of Wyoming had established equal suffrage 
in 1869 — the one complete victory of the early period.) 
Colorado established the reform by constitutional amend- 
ment in 1893. In 1896 Utah became the third suffrage 
State, "completing the trinity of true Republics at the 
summit of the Rockies'" ; and Idaho followed, the same 
year. For fifteen years no new commonwealth was won to 
the cause, but none the less the "woman movement" was 
making rapid progress in politics, in industry, and in social 
recognition. Then, in 1910, Washington gave women the 
full ballot. California did so in her reform year, 1911. 
The democratic year 1912 (page 677 ff.), and its aftermath 
in 1913-14, raised the total number of suffrage States 
to twelve by adding Arizona, Kansas, Oregon, Nevada, 
Montana, and Illinois; and in 1916 some 4,000,000 women 
voted for President and Congressmen. 

Illinois had been the only State so far east of the Mississippi 
to give the vote to women ; and there the result was reached 
by legislative action, not by constitutional amendment, and 
so could not extend to State officers. But in 1917 this 
"Presidential suffrage" was won for women in Indiana, 
South Dakota, North Dakota, Rhode Island, Michigan, and 
Nebraska; and at the November election a constitutional 

' Many States have long allowed a modified form of suflfrage to women in 
local elections, especially in school elections. 



VOTES FOR WOMEN 671 

amendment gave women the complete suffrage in the great 
State of New York, The overwhehning weight of that State 
in the National government gave peculiar importance to this 
last victory — spite of defeats at the same election in Ohio 
and Maine — and many former opponents at once an- 
nounced that they laid down their arms in obedience to the 
pronounced will of the American people. The success of 
the Susan B. Anthony amendment for the Nation was now 
clearly only a matter of time. The vigorous part taken 
by women in winning the World War did nmch to remove 
remaining opposition, and in 1920 the Suffrage amendment 
became the law of the land. It was, however, not the 
Thirteenth amendment, but the Nineteenth; and, instead 
of being the first country to adopt this democratic measure, 
the United States was the twenty-second. 

As the States were renovated by new democratic ma- 
chinery, they turned promptly to the uplift of the common 
life by a long series of social reforms. No one of these 
has been more spectacular in its rapid victory than the 
Temperance movement. Between 1905 and 1916, a union 
of various Anti-saloon forces (largely independent of the 
regular Prohibition party) made half the States "dry," 
and set up "county option" in half the rest. The needs of 
the country during the World War gave increased momen- 
tum to the movement, and made National action imperative. 
In 1917 a nation-wide prohibition became law for the 
continuance of the war, and before this law expired the 
Eighteenth amendment had established that policy per- 
manently for America. 

One factor in this amazing victory calls for explanation. 
The Brewery Combine early went into politics. Every- 
where it fought Woman Suffrage — because it knew women 
would fight the saloon. It fought the referendum and ini- 
tiative, because it feared the people, and trusted in its 
power to corrupt legislatures. It fought every attempt to 
check or abolish Special Privilege, from a lively expectation 
of political help to be received in return. It fought the 



672 THE PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENT 

election of "reformers" of all sorts, to protect itself or its 
allies. And finally reformers of all sorts learned that they 
must fight the Liquor power — as a step toward any other 
reform. 

As the story has shown, each of the leading reforms, after 
starting in State action, soon appeared on the stage of 
Theodore National politics. And during the closing twenty 
Roosevelt years of the nineteenth century, a group of ag- 
gressive young reformers appeared in public life (page 589) . 
The most picturesque among them was Theodore Roosevelt 
of New York, — police commissioner of New York City, 
Civil Service Commissioner (page 597), Colonel of the 
"Rough Riders" in the Spanish War (page 613). In 1898 
Roosevelt was overwhelmingly elected governor of New 
York, and had begun to loom up as a possible presidential 
candidate, to the dread of the Republican machine. In 
the Republican Convention of 1900 the bosses joined forces 
to shelve him by nominating him for the figurehead vice- 
presidency, against his vehement protest. A few months 
later, the assassination of McKinley made him President. 
For the first time in our history, an "accidental President" 
took place at once as a popular leader, and in 1904 he was 
triumphantly reelected. (The Democratic party in 1904 
was controlled mainly by the Eastern and conservative 
faction, represented by the candidate. Judge Alton B. 
Parker.) 

The seven and a half years of the Roosevelt adminis- 
trations mark an epoch. In public addresses the strenuous 
President denounced in startling terms the insolence and 
criminal greed of aggregated capital, and so aroused the 
people to the need of action. The actual achievements of the 
administration in its professed work of curbing the trusts 
and monopolies were less significant. Still the "classified 
list" under the "civil service reform" law was extended to 
include even the smallest country postmasters in the more 
settled half of the country ; the Interstate Commerce Com- 
mission was revived by the Hepburn amendment (page 632) ; 



AND THEODORE ROOSEVELT 



673 



suits were pressed vigorously against many trusts under the 
Sherman Act and Interstate Commerce law ; ^ the scan- 
dalous conditions in the Chicago stockyards were in- 
vestigated ; a Pure Food law forbade Interstate Commerce 
in adulterated foods ; ' and, most important of all, new 
emphasis was given to the ''conservation of National re- 
sources" — a doctrine formulated by Gilford Pinchot, and 
popularized by the President. 




The Arrow Rock Dam (Idaho), still building in 1918 when this photo was taken: 
part of one of the most famous of all the government's projects to irrigate arid 
lands. This dam is 67 feet higher than the great Roosevelt Dam in Arizona. 

President Roosevelt was attacked by certain of the "in- 
terests" as a disturber of "prosperity"; but he had a hold 
upon the nation such as no other Presidents had approached, 
with the exception of Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, and 

1 During the preceding administrations of Harrison, Cleveland, and McKinley, 
there had been in all 16 prosecutions ; in Roosevelt's seven years there were 44, 
though little actual check to the trusts resulted. 

2 State laws had already begun a long-needed war upon noxious adulterations. 
Said Roosevelt, in one of his catchy phrases, — "No man may poison the public 
for private gain." 



674 THE PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENT 

Lincoln. At the same time extreme radicals disliked his 
aggressive foreign policy and his inclination to paternalistic 
despotism at home. Such critics pointed out (1) that he 
used his tremendous personal and oflScial power to aid no 
other real "progressive" in any of the many State con- 
tests with Privilege ; (2) that his trust prosecutions had 
not hurt any money king; (3) that he had intimate per- 
sonal relations with some of the trust magnates, — heads of 
what he chose to call "good trusts"; (4) that during his 
seven years the number of trusts had greatly multiplied and 
their capitalization vastly increased (page 639), along with 
the new device of concentrating power by the system of 
interlocking directorates ; and (5) that he had as yet taken 
no stand to reform the tariff, in which his "good trusts" 
were deeply interested. 

In October, 1907, the Knickerbocker Trust Company 
in New York failed, from speculation and dishonest manage- 
jjjg ment, and brought down with it a group of banks 

" panic " supposed to be strong. This began the "panic of 
of 1907 1907." Wall Street, and "big business" gener- 

ally, attributed the panic to "Theodore the Meddler," 
who, they asserted, had destroyed public confidence by his 
attacks upon the commercial interests. Many radicals, on 
the other hand, claimed that big business had "manufac- 
tured" the panic, so as to intimidate the President and the 
other reformers into keeping hands off. In any case, for 
once, the cry "It hurts business" failed to check the current 
for reform. 

Roosevelt thought his Secretary of War, William H. 
Taft, especially fitted to carry on his reforms. Accord- 
ingly in 1908, he forced Taft upon the Republi- 
adminis- cans as his successor. The Democrats nominated 
tration: Bryan for the third time. Between the Roosevelt 
Republicans of that time and the Bryan Demo- 
crats there were many points of sympathy ; while within 
each party a large class was bitterly opposed to these re- 
form policies, and desired a return to the older attitude of 
the government as a promoter of business prosperity rather 



AND REACTION UNDER TAFT 675 

than of human welfare. Owing to the general confidence 
of large masses in Roosevelt, and to the aid given the Re- 
publicans by aggregated wealth, Taft was elected over- 
whelmingly. 

As Roosevelt's Secretary of War, Mr. Taft had been a 
loyal subordinate ; but now it soon appeared that he did not 
himself believe in the "Roosevelt policies." Instead, he be- 
longed distinctly in the conservative ranks. 

A group of capitalists had been trying to engross the 
mineral wealth of Alaska, in part by fraudulent entries. 
Roosevelt had checked the proceeding by tempo- jj^g 
rarily withdrawing the lands from entry. Richard Baiimger 
Ballinger had been the attorney of the grasping '^^^^ 
ring of capitalists, and previously had served them with in- 
formation even while in the service of the government. 
President Taft was induced to appoint this man his Sec- 
retary of the Interior, and it seemed as though the grab 
would then go through under his sanction. The President 
even dismissed both Gifford Pinchot (a devoted public serv- 
ant and a man of high standing in the nation) and also 
Louis Glavis, a subordinate of Ballinger, who had gallantly 
exposed the treacherous designs of his chief with necessary 
disregard for official etiquette.^ Happily, the sacrifice of 
Glavis, the war waged month after month by Collier's 
Weekly, and the consequent Congressional investigation, 
even though by a packed committee, compelled Ballinger 
to resign, and saved the Alaskan wealth for the nation. No 
one suspected the President of corrupt motives ; but it was 
plain that the corrupt interests had his ear. Other events 
made his position clear. He did not scruple to use his vast 
power of patronage to injure progressive Congressmen in 
their home districts. 

Another public clash between President Taft and the 
Progressives came on the tariff question. The Republican 
platform of 1908 had declared for a thoroughgoing revision 
of the Dingley tariff (page 600), asserting that duties ought 

1 Glavis' "insubordination " consisted in fealty to the American people rather 
than to a traitorous superior in oflBce. 



676 THE PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENT 

only to "equal the difference l^etween the cost of produc- 
tion at home and abroad, together with a reasonable profit 
The Payne- ^^^ American industries." ^ Mr. Taft, too, had 
Aidrich wagcd his campaign largely on definite pledges for 

*"^ tariff reduction. Shrewd observers doubted some- 

what whether the politicians of the party were not too 
thoroughly in the grip of the trusts to make any real inroad 
upon the protected interests ; and the result justified the 
skeptical prophecies that any revision by the Republican 
machine of that day would be a revision upward. The 
Payne- Aidrich tariff of 1910, while making improvements 
on a few points, actually aggravated the evils which the 
nation had expected to have remedied. It was a brazen 
defiance of party pledges in the campaign. The House 
committee, which framed the bill, was notorious, made up, 
almost to a man, of representatives of beneficiaries of pro- 
tection, — a clear case of turning the place of sheep dogs 
over to wolves. 

The bill and the committee were attacked fiercely by a 
large number of the more independent Republican papers 
And the and leaders ; but the great body of Republican 
Insurgents Congressmen, it was soon clear, would "stand 
pat" for the "System." A radical section then broke aivay 
in a definite ''Insurgent''' movement. In the House, the 
"System" Speaker, "Uncle Joe" Cannon, aided by the nec- 
essary number of ''System'" Democrats, easily forced the bill 
through, with brief consideration. In the Senate, where 
debate could not so easily be muzzled, insurgent Republi- 
can leaders like La Follette and Cummins exposed merci- 
lessly the atrocities of the measure, though they could 
not hinder its becoming law. And then the compliant 
President, in attempts to defend his "Stand-pat" friends 
from public criticism, declared it the best tariff ever 
enacted. 

The Congressional election of 1910 ivas a revolution. The 

' Somewhat more definitely, the Democratic platform declared for immediate 
reduction of duties on necessaries and for placing on the "free list" all "articles 
entering into competition with trust-controlled products." 



AND THE ELECTION OF 1912 677 

overwhelming Republican majority was wiped out by as large 
a Democratic majority ; and in various impregnable Repub- 
lican districts, Insurgents succeeded Stand-patters. Even in 
the slowly changing Senate, Democrats and Insurgents to- 
gether mustered a clear majority. Some progressive legis- 
lation was now enacted. A "'parcel post" law, similar to 
those long in use in European countries, struck down the in- 
famous monopoly of the great express companies ; the ad- 
mirable "Children's Bureau" was added to the government 
machinery ; and constitutional amendments were at last 
enacted providing for income taxes and direct election of 
Senators (pages 600, 669). 

In 1912 Roosevelt announced himself a candidate against 
Taft for the Republican Presidential nomination. There 
followed a bitter campaign of disgraceful recrimi- The election 
nation between the President and his former ofi9i2: 
friend and chief. In 13 States, Republican voters RepubUcan 
could then express their choice for a candidate in Convention 
direct primaries (page 665). Roosevelt carried 9 of these; 
La Follette, 2 ; and Taft, 2. President Taft, however, con- 
trolled the solid mass of Southern delegates and the ma- 
chinery of the National Convention. The credentials 
committee "threw out" many Roosevelt delegations from 
States where there were "contests," and Taft p^^^ 
won the nomination. Roosevelt declared the Roosevelt's 
nomination "a barefaced steal," asserted that no 
honest man could vote for a ticket "based on dishonor," 
and called a mass meeting of progressives to organize a 
new party. 

Meantime, the Democratic Convention, in session for 
nine days at Baltimore, made significant history. In this 
party, too, the preceding campaign had been a ^j^g 
bitter contest between open progressives and Democratic 
more or less secret reactionaries. When the Con- 
vention met, the old bosses were in control of a majority 
of votes. They made plain their intention to organize the 
meeting in their interest by putting forward for the tempo- 
rary chairmanship Judge Alton B. Parker (page 672). Mr. 



678 THE PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENT 

Bryan had declined to be a candidate for ike presidency 
again, and he now stepped forward as a courageous and 
And Mr. skillful champion of the progressive element, wag- 
Bryan jjjg ^ contest that finally wrested control from 
the bosses and turned his party over to the real democracy. 

Bryan first appealed to the candidates for the presidential 
nomination to oppose the bosses' choice for chairman, — a 
man "conspicuously identified, in the eyes of the public, 
with the reactionary element." Woodrow Wilson alone 
stood this "acid test." Other candidates evaded, or pleaded 
for harmony, to avoid offending possible supporters. Wilson 
frankly and cordially approved Bryan's purpose. Thus the 
issue was drawn, and Wilson was marked, even more 
clearly than before, as the true candidate of the progressives. 
The bosses seated their man for chairman, but the Demo- 
cratic masses throughout the country shouted approval of 
Bryan and Wilson. 

Next Mr. Bryan startled the convention and the country 
by a daring resolution — which was carried almost unani- 
mously — declaring the convention opposed to the nomi- 
nation of any candidate "who is the representative of, or 
under obligations to, J. Pierpont Morgan, Thomas F. Ryan, 
August Belmont, or any other member of the privilege- 
hunting and favor-seeking class." Two of the gentlemen 
named sat in the Convention. In the debate Mr. Bryan 
said : — 

"Extraordinary conditions need extraordinary remedies. . . . 
There is not a delegate who does not know that an effort is being 
made right now to sell the Democratic party into bondage to the 
predatory interests of the country. It is the most brazen, the 
most insolent, the most impudent attempt that has been made in 
the history of American politics to dominate a convention, stifle 
the honest sentiment of a people, and make the nominee the bond 
slave of the men who exploit this country. . . . No sense of 
politeness to such men will keep me from protecting my party 
from the disgrace they inflict upon it." 

Champ Clark of Missouri at one time had a majority of 
the delegates for the nomination, but the Democratic rule 



AND THE ELECTION OF 1912 679 

required a two-thirds majority. As the balloting proceeded 
slowly day after day, Wilson gained steadily, mainly be- 
cause of thousands of telegrams from "the people Nomination 
at home," threatening, urging, imploring their of Wilson 
representatives to support Bryan's leadership and Wilson's 
candidacy. On the forty-sixth ballot Wilson was nomi- 
nated. The progressive element, which had failed in the Re- 
publican Convention, had conquered in the Democratic. 

And soon another progressive ticket was in the field. 
Roosevelt's friends proceeded with their new organization, 
took the name the Progressive party, and nomi- ^j^^ p^.^, 
nated Roosevelt upon an admirable radical plat- gressive 
form which included Woman Suffrage. Many ^^^^^ 
ardent reformers rallied to this long-desired opportunity 
for a new alignment in politics ; but a large number of 
their old associates felt that the movement was ill-timed, 
when the Baltimore nomination had offered so excellent an 
opportunity to progressives. 

Woodrow Wilson was elected by the largest electoral 
plurality in our history, the vote standing, — Wilson, 
435 ; Roosevelt, 88 ; Taft, 8. Wilson's popular vote 
exceeded that of Roosevelt by over two million ; and 
Roosevelt's was nearly 700,000 more than Taft's. At the 
same time, it was plain that the result was due to the split 
in the Republican party. Mr. Wilson was far from getting 
a popular majority : indeed he had fewer votes than the 
defeated Bryan got four years before, — a significant com- 
mentary upon the imperfection of our political machinery. 

Mr. Wilson's first two years (1913-1914) saw a remarkable 
record of political promises fulfilled. He called Congress 
at once in a special session, and kept it at work continu- 
ously for almost the whole twenty-four months. The three 
great problems were the tariff, the currency, and the trusts. 
Each was dealt with fully, after careful consideration. 

The Underwood tariff was a genuine "revision downward," 
and its making was at least less influenced by The Under- 
great "special interests" than that of any tariff wood Tariff 
since the Civil War. Business had wailed "Ruin"; but 



680 THE PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENT 

no ruin came, and business quickly accepted the new 
situation. 

The Federal Reserve Act revised the banking laws, made 
the currency of the country more elastic, and checked 
somewhat the possibility of its being controlled by the 
"money trust " — so long as the government itself represents 
the people. A few months later (July, 1914) the unexpected 
outbreak of the European war closed the great money 
centers of the world without warning; but in this country 
no bank felt obliged to call its loans. Admirers of the law 
claim that it has made the old-fashioned "panic" almost 
impossible ; and certainly many of the great banks which 
had been frantically alarmed by the prospect of the law 
soon became its warm supporters. 

A Federal Trade Commission was created, to investigate 
complaints of unfair dealing by large concerns toward smaller 
The Clayton Competitors and to provide helpful information 
Anti-Trust and advice when appealed to by legitimate busi- 
ness. This new beneficent branch of the govern- 
ment holds a place in the field of trade much like that of the 
great Interstate Commerce Commission in the field of trans- 
portation. At the same time the Clayton Anti-Trust Act 
sought to check the evil of "interlocking directorates," and 
to give the courts clear rules for dealing with Trust offenses 
in place of the vagueness of the old Sherman law. 

In addition to meeting so the three pressing problems, the 
administration secured a law for a graduated income tax. 
The Income shifting the burden of the government in part 
"^^ from the poor to the very rich. Quite as impor- 

tant was a new and needed protection given to labor 
unions. The courts had begun to threaten unions with 
punishment for strikes, under the provision of the Sherman 
law forbidding "conspiracies in restraint of trade." The 
Clayton Act expressly exempted labor combinations from such 
prosecution. "The labor of a human being," runs this 
noble provision, "is not an article of commerce." Equally 
pleasing to Labor was another law checking the tendency 
to "government by injunction." 



AND WOODROW WILSON 



681 



Most of this legislation has since been rendered futile by 
the courts, but at the time progressives were jubilant. 
President Wilson had long been known as a leading 
American scholar, a brilliant writer, and a great teacher 
and university president; but his warmest admirers had 
hardly hoped for such efficient leadership from "the school- 
master in politics." This splendid constructive record was 



f t 



^Cg^ ^^ 



^.^ 



%^ -. 



♦• •*!» 



-^0^ 



lAliiirai 



The United States Supreme Court in 1920. 



Hrandeis Pitney 

Day McKenna White 



McReynolds 
Holmes 



Clarke 
Van Devanter 



his work; and he carried it to victory by a party long 
unused to union and with large elements ready to rebel if 
they dared. He won his victory, too, not by abus- ^^ 
ing his power of patronage to keep Congressmen in Wilson's 
line, but by sheer skill and force of character, ®^ ^'^ '^ 
aided by the general consciousness that the nation was 
rallying to his program. 

The second half of this first term was darkened and con- 
fused by terrible foreign complications (below) ; but these 
years, too, saw sound progress in domestic reform. A Good 



J 



682 WOODROW WILSON 

Roads law offered national aid to the States in building 
roads, so as to bring the farmer's market nearer to him. 
Wilsons -^^^^ Smith-Lever Agricultural Education Act offered 
second Cooperation with the States in teaching the farmer 

^^^^ how to use the soil more profitably. And the 

Rural Credits'' law made the first attempt in our history to 
get for the farmer the credit and the low interest commonly 
enjoyed by other business interests. A Workman's Com- 
pensation law (page 655), of the most advanced character, 
was made to apply to all Federal employees. And the 
Child-Labor law (page 654) sought to free the children of 
the South from crushing labor in factories and mines. 

The last two of these bills had passed the House, but were 
being still held up in the Senate in August of 1916. Presi- 
dent Wilson made a quiet visit to the Senate wing of the 
Capitol, met the Democratic leaders there, and demanded 
that they pass both bills before adjournment. Said a hos- 
tile periodical — " That is ' politics ' but it is politics in a high 
and statesmanlike sense of the word." (In 1918 the Child- 
Labor law was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme 
Court; but the same end was at once secured by a new 
" Child-Labor Tax " law.) 

Foreign perils, however, were the chief mark of President 
Wilson's second two years, — foreign perils more complicated 
Mexican ^^^ threatening than any President before him had 
compUca- had to facc. For years Mexico had been weltering 
tions jj^ political assassination and revolution. Finally 

the "Constitutionalist" chief, Carranza, became master ; re- 
mained so much longer than any recent predecessor, largely 
because of prompt recognition by the United States ; and set 
himself stubbornly to the gigantic task of rebuilding his 
country, with at first much show of progress. He did not 
prove able, it is true, to keep down revolt and brigandage in 
remote mountainous districts or on the American border. 
The Mexican people hate and fear the Americans, and bandits 
who repeatedly took American citizens from railroad trains 
to murder them, and who raided American towns across the 



I 



AND MEXICO 683 

border with every form of outrage, were always sheltered 
among their own people. To one who knows only this side 
of the story it would seem that few wars have had more 
provocation than Mexico offered the United States. 

On the other hand, lawless and violent Americans along 
the frontier have been guilty of numerous outrages on un- 
protected Mexican soil, of which the mass of Americans 
never hear. Great American "interests," too, hungry to 
seize for themselves raw wealth of oil and rubber, which 
Carranza was seeking to keep for a people's inheritance, 
constantly clamored for American intervention to "restore 
order " in Mexico. The skillful propaganda of these interests 
was the more dangerous because a deplorably large part of 
American society, with its customary harsh contempt for^u--' 
alien peoples, feels that sooner or later we must "clean up" 
Mexico by taking it away from a race incapable of civilization. 
But President Wilson, with a noble sympathy for wiison 
a distressed people feeling its way stumblingly to- avoids war 
ward a national life, held resolutely to a policy of "watchful 
waiting," and charged publicly that Mexican disorders were 
due largely to secret incitement and support from American 
interests determined to embroil the two countries. Critics 
derided this policy bitterly as responsible for the unavenged 
murder of American citizens. Admirers declared it right and 
wise. Nothing else, they urged, could have done so much 
to allay the ancient distrust felt toward us by all our Latin- 
American neighbors, whose friendship we so much desire. 
At the same time the Carranza government persisted in 
expressing bitter distrust of President Wilson, partly per- 
haps because on two occasions of extreme provocation 
he so far abandoned his general policy as to send troops 
into Mexico — in both cases with little result. 

Meantime in the Old World heavier clouds had long been 
massing; and in July of 1914 had come a flash to set the 
world ablaze — from the policy of the Austrian Empire 
toward her troublesome "Mexico," Serbia. The story of 
American history now becomes entangled inextricably, for 
the time *at least, with the complex web of world history. 



PAET XII — THE WOKLD WAR 
CHAPTER XLIII 

HOW THE WAR CAME 

I. THE MATERIALS FOR CONFLAGRATION 

Within our own nation (as of course also in every other) 
we have seen a fierce and ever-growing struggle for wealth 
Anti-social and power between individuals and between 
forces classes. At no distant future, that struggle must 

become a menace to civilization, unless we learn to sub- 
stitute for selfish rivalry some form of cooperation for the 
common good. Intranational competition, however, is 
ameliorated by the fact that it is m^ranational. There 
are legislatures to prescribe rules of the game, and courts 
to arbitrate disputes ; and so, even in our threatening class- 
struggle, we can postpone, and perhaps ultimately avoid, a 
fatal clash. 

Civilization is endangered more immediately by a like 
competition between nations themselves. In 1900 the world 
held some fifty of these larger " individuals," engaged (all 
that were strong enough to risk it) in a precisely similar 
struggle for wealth and power. And for them there was 
no higher arbiter, no common legislature, to soften the 
brutal maxim, " The race is to the strong, and the Devil 
take the hindmost." 

For any nation not to engage in that race to the full 
extent of its powers would have been to acquiesce cravenly 
in inferiority, — less labor and poorer pay for its working- 
men, less profit for its capital, and therefore a lower civiliza- 
tion. Modern civilization is based primarily on industrial- 
ism ; and the life blood of modern industrialism is trade : 
trade not merely with other civilized nations, but also for 

684 



TRADE RIVALRIES 685 

the products of tropical and subtropical regions, where a 
few years ago no strong state existed, and where, accord- 
ingly, civilized capitalists found the best chances to exploit 
the raw wealth, including the labor of defenseless human 
beings. 

Under existing conditions it is futile to blame a nation for 
entering the struggle. The blame lies in the amazing fact 
that no nation made any determined and intelligent effort to 
change these conditions so as to abolish commercial cannibalism. 
Rightly seen, the raw wealth of the globe belongs to no one or 
two arbitrary divisions of the globe's population : it is the 
heritage of the whole world, present and to come ; and there 
must be a world organization to see it properly safeguarded and 
utilized. True, this is much to ask of a world in which each nation 
; still permits grasping individuals to engross natural wealth that 
should belong to all its people. But if the task is great, so is the 
peril in not accomplishing it. The alternative is ruin. The 
hope that we may achieve a world federation to save civiliza- 
tion, lies in the old imperative, "We can, because we must." 

Ever since Columbus and da Gama disclosed to little 
Europe the vast new worlds east and west, the European 
" powers " have been grabbing greedily at " colonial jj^^^j., 
empire." That is, each has sought to seize the national 
largest possible part of the world's raw materials "^* ^ 
for its factories, and the largest markets for its factory 
output. In the eighteenth century, this rivalry became 
world-wide war. From 1689 to 1783, France and England 
wrestled incessantly for world empire, grappling on every 
continent and every sea, while, as allies of this one or 
of that, the other powers grasped at crumbs of European 
booty, and — more distant but more directly involved — 
Black men speared one another on the banks of the 
Senegal, Red men scalped one another on the shores of 
the Great Lakes, and the native populations of ancient 
India trampled one another under the feet of trumpeting 
elephants. The close saw France almost stripped of her 
old dependencies ; and, a little later, when she seemed 
helpless in her Revolution, England attacked her again to 



686 HOW THE WAR CAME 

complete the victory. For a while Napoleon seemed likely 
to regain the Mississippi valley and India ; but Waterloo 
left England " the mightiest nation upon earth," for some 
seventy years without an aggressive rival for world do- 
minion. During that period, other European nations got 
along somehow (though less prosperous than England) be- 
cause trade had not yet become the supremely vital thing 
it was soon to be. The Industrial Revolution, which had 
transformed England by 1800, and America by 1825, and 
France by 1840, did not really reach Germany until nearly 
1870. Even then, for a while, France and Germany were 
occupied mainly with their intense European rivalry. But 
steam and electricity were swiftly drawing the globe's most 
distant provinces into intimate unity, and world trade was 
taking on a new importance. Accordingly, after 1871, the 
new capitalistic French Republic began to seek expansion 
in north Africa and southeastern Asia ; and in 1884, at the 
Congress of Berlin, the new capitalistic German Empire 
gave notice that thenceforth it meant to share in the plunder. 
The next quarter-century saw a mad scramble between Ger- 
many, France, and the already partially sated England for 
the world's remaining rich provinces defended only by "in- 
ferior" races. Meanwhile the United States, occupied until 
then by the appropriation of her own vast continent from 
ocean to ocean, began to reach out for the islands of the 
sea ; and Russia accelerated her century-long expansion 
in Asia toward India (threatening England's hold there) 
and toward ice-free Pacific ports, threatening China and 
Japan, until checked in the Russo-Jap War of 1904-1905. 

This nineteenth-century exploitation, unlike that of the 
eighteenth, had been carried forward at the expense of 
savage or semi-barbarous peoples only. For a hundred 
years there had been no "great" war between "Christian" 
nations waged openly for greed. ^ Indeed, toward the close, 

^ The Crimean and Spanish-American wars were not avowedly for empire. 
The Mexican War is more to the point; but it was a trifling struggle, and much 
of the world was ready to acquiesce in a too common American opinion that the 
weak and disorganized Mexicans had no rights that a powerful neighbor was 
bound to respect. 



EUROPEAN ALLIANCES "FOR PEACE" 687 

whenever one nation made an important seizure of booty, 
some international conference arranged compensatory gains 
for any seriously discontented rival — and so preserved 
temporarily a delicate "balance" of interests. 

But this balance was one of exceedingly unstable equilib- 
rium. A touch might tip it into universal ruin. And 
there were no materials to continue adjusting it on ^^ ^j^g 
the old plan. The world was now parceled out. approach 
Further expansion of consequence by any "power" ° ^" 
meant direct conflict with some other "power." More- 
over, so complicated had rivalries and alliances become, any 
conflict at all now meant a world conflict ; and, so " im- 
proved" were agencies of destruction, a world struggle now 
meant ruin out of all comparison with earlier wars. 

To-day this is plain enough. But until the late summer 
of 1914 the certain danger (and the only way of escape) was 
glimpsed but dimly and by only a few " dreamers." Com- 
placently the peoples and their " practical " statesmen con- 
tinued to drift on the brink of unparalleled disaster. It 
seems now almost incredible that a world inhabited by 
rational beings should not at least have made some deter- 
mined effort to prepare for peace; but in plain fact (apart 
from the rather empty gestures discussed in chapter xl) 
the mightier nations merely hastened the catastrophe by 
preparing only for war. 

By 1910, Europe had aligned itself in two camps, the 
Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente. 

1. After Bismarck conquered France in 1871, he sought 
to isolate her so as to keep her from finding any ally in a 
possible "war of revenge." To this end he culti- Bismarck's 
vated friendship with all other European powers. Triple 
but especially with Russia and Austria. Austria *°*^® 
he had beaten in war only a few years earlier (1866) ; but 
he had treated her with marked gentleness in the peace 
treaty, and the ruling German element in Austria was 
quite ready now to find backing in the powerful and suc- 
cessful German Empire. 



688 HOW THE WAR CAME 

Soon, however, Bismarck found that he must choose be- 
tween Austria and Russia. These two were bitter rivals for 
control in the Balkans. The Slav peoples there, recently 
freed from the Turks, looked naturally to Russia, who had 
won their freedom for them, as the "Big Brother" of all 
Slavs. But Austria, shut out now by the new Germany from 
control in central Europe, was bent upon aggrandizement to 
the south. In particular her statesmen meant to win a 
strip of territory through to Saloniki, on the Aegean, so that, 
with a railroad thither, they might control the rich Aegean 
trade. Accordingly Austria sought always to keep Serbia 
weak and small, that she might interpose no barrier to these 
ambitious -plans ; while Russia, hating Austria even more 
than she loved the Balkan Slavs, backed Serbia. 

This rivalry became so acute by 1879 that there was 
always danger of war ; and in that year Bismarck chose to 
side with Austria as the surer ally. Three years later, he 
drew Italy into the league, making it the Triple Alliance. 
Italy was so bitterly enraged at the French seizure of Tunis 
in that year, in flat disregard of Italian imperialistic ambi- 
tions there, that she laid aside her ancient differences with 
Austria for a time and agreed to aid the central empires in 
any war in which they should be attacked by two or more 
powers — in return for backing in her colonial ambitions. 

2. Then Russia and France, each isolated in Europe, drew 
together for mutual protection into a "Dual Alliance" (1884). 
The Dual This left England alone of the Great Powers outside 
Alliance these alliances. Bismarck hoped to draw her into 
his "triple" league, and his hope was not unreasonable. In 
the eighties and nineties, England and France were bitter 
rivals in Africa, and England and Russia, in Asia. England, 
however, clung to a proud policy of "splendid isolation." 
Then, after Bismarck's fall, she began to see in the German 
Emperor's colonial ambitions a more threatening rival than 
France ; and Russia's defeat by Japan made Russia less dan- 
gerous. German militarism, too, was hateful to English 
democracy. Moreover, England and France were daily 



THE BALKAN SEED PLOT 689 

coming to a better understanding, and in 1903 a standing 
arbitration treaty made war between them much less likely. 
Soon afterward, England and Russia succeeded in agreeing 
upon a line in Persia to separate the "influence" of one 
power in that country from the "influence" of the other, so 
removing all immediate prospect of trouble between the two. 
From this time the Dual Alliance became the Triple En- 
tente — England, France, and Russia. England was not 
bound by definite treaty to give either country aid in war ; 
but it was plain that France and Russia were her friends. 

Each of the two huge leagues always protested that its 
aim was peace. No doubt many men in both — and nearly 
all in one — did shrink from precipitating a conflict between 
such enormous forces under the new conditions of army 
organization, quick transportation, and deadly explosives. 
For half a century, except for the minor struggles in the 
half-savage Balkans, Europe rested in an "armed peace." 
But this "peace" was based upon fear, and it was costly. 
Year by year, each alliance strove to make its armies and 
navies mightier than the other's. Huge and huger cannon 
were invented, only to be cast into the scrap heap for still 
huger ones. A dreadnaught costing millions was scrapped 
in a few months by some costlier design. The burden upon 
the workers and the evil moral influences of such armaments 
were only less than the burden and evil of war. Of all 
civilized countries, too, only England, trusting to her navy, 
and the United States, trusting to geography, were free 
from the more crushing burden of universal military service. 
Worst of all, the situation in itself made for war. In every 
land, thousands of ambitious young officers, devoted to 
their calling, could not escape an itch to try out their pet war 
machine — and to prove for themselves an excuse for being. 

n. THE BALKANS: A SEED PLOT FOR WAR 

Here were heaped materials for a world conflagration. A 
fuse was found in the Balkan situation. The little Balkan 
district is a crumpled criss-cross of interlacing mountains 



690 HOW THE WAR CAME 

and valleys, peopled by tangled fragments of six distinct 
and mutually antagonistic peoples : the Turk, long en- 
camped as a conqueror among subject Christian populations, 
but for the last hundred years slowly thrust back toward 
Constantinople; the Greeks, mainly in the southern pen- 
insula, with the Albanians just to the north along the 
Adriatic; the Roumanians, mainly north of the Danube; 
and, between Greece and Roumania, the Bulgarians and 
Serbs. The "Bulgars" (on the east, toward the Black 
Sea) came into the peninsula as conquerors from Central 
Asia in the eighth century. Originally baggy -trousered 
nomads, akin to Tartars, they have become essentially 
Slavic in blood by absorption into the peoples among whom 
they settled; but they keep a ruinous "patriotic" pride in 
their ancient history as a race of conquerors. The Serbs 
are the most direct representatives of the South Slavs who 
conquered and settled the Balkan region two hundred years 
before the appearance of the Bulgars; but in 1910 their 
ancient empire was still in fragments from accidents of 
Turkish rule. Bosnia, the northwestern part, had main- 
tained itself against the conquering Turk longest, and, be- 
coming a distinct province under the Turks, had never 
been reunited to the rest of Serbia. The lands of the Croats 
and Slovenes were reconquered from Turkey by Hungary 
in the eighteenth century, and had long been subject 
provinces of the Austrian Empire, though they belonged to 
Serbia by race, language, and older history. And in the 
fastnesses of Montenegro ("Black Mountain") dwelt some 
two hundred thousand half-savage Serbs who had never 
yielded to the Turk but had kept their independence at the 
expense of "five hundred years of ferocious heroism." 

About a century ago the rule of the Turk in the Balkans 
began to disintegrate. Greece won independence in an 
eight-year war (1821-1828) ; and Roumania and Serbia 
were advanced to the position of merely tributary states, 
ruled thenceforth by their own princes. The Crimean War 
(1856), in which France and England attacked Russia, 
bolstered up the tottering Ottoman Empire for a time, but a 



THE BALKAN SEED PLOT 691 

great collapse came twenty years later. The Sultan had 
promised many reforms for his Christian subjects ; but these 
promises bore no fruit, and in 1875-1876 the Bosnians and 
Bulgarians rose for independence. There followed the horri- 
ble events long known as the "Bulgarian Atrocities." 
Turkish soldiers destroyed a hundred Bulgarian villages 
with every form of devilish torture imaginable, and massa- 
cred 30,000 people, carrying off also thousands of Christian 
girls into terrible slavery. Then Serbia sprang to arms ; 
and Tsar Alexander II of Russia declared war on J^y^sso- 
Turkey. The horror in Western Europe at the Turkish 
crimes of the Turk prevented for a time any 
interference ; and in ten months the Russian armies held the 
Turks at their mercy. The Peace of San Stefano (1878) 
arranged for a group of free Slav states in the peninsula and 
for the exclusion of Turkey from Europe except for the city 
of Constantinople. 

Alexander would probably have kept on to secure Con- 
stantinople, had he not seen a growing danger of European 
interference. And even now Europe did inter- cngress 
vene. Austria wanted a share of Balkan plunder ; of BerUn, 
England feared the advance of Russia toward her 
communications with India ; and so the Peace of San Stefano 
was torn up. The Congress of Berlin (1878), dominated by 
Disraeli, the English Conservative, restored half the freed 
Christian populations . to their old slavery under the Turk; 
handed over Bosnia to Austria to "administer" for Turkey, 
ivith a solemn provision that Austria should never annex the 
territory to her own realms ; and left the whole Balkan 
district in anarchy for a third of a century more. (See 
map, p. 694.) In fixing responsibility for the World War 
of 1914, this crime of 1878 cannot be overlooked. 

It is only fair to note that while the English government 
was chiefly responsible for that crime, the English people 
promptly repudiated it at the polls. Gladstone came 
forth from retirement to stump England against the "shame- 
ful alliance with Abdul the Assassin" ; and at the next elec- 
tions (1880), Disraeli was overthrown by huge majorities. 



692 HOW THE WAR CAME 

The wrong to the Balkans could not then be undone, but 
from this time England drew away from her old policy of 
courting Turkish friendship — wherein her place was quickly 
taken by Germany. 

No part of her non-European empire interested German 
ambition so deeply as her advance into Asia Minor. This 
Germany in began in earnest about 1900. Germany did not 
Asia Minor acquire actual title to territory there ; but she did 
secure from Turkey various rich "concessions," guarantee- 
ing her for long periods the sole right to build and operate 
great railroads and to develop valuable mining and oil 
properties; and this "economic penetration" she intended 
confidently to turn into political sovereignty. 

To obtain such concessions, Germany had sought the 
Turk's favor in shameful ways. She loaned to the Sultan 
German oflScers to reorganize and drill the Turkish armies, 
and supplied him with the most modern arms to keep down 
the rising Christian natives under his yoke — as in the Turk- 
ish war with Greece for Crete in 1897. And in 1895 when 
new Armenian massacres had roused England (precisely as 
Spanish massacres in Cuba some two years later aroused the 
United States) so that great public meetings were calling 
for war upon Turkey, Kaiser Wilhelm sent to the Sultan 
his photograph and that of his wife, as a pledge of German 
friendship and support. 

The prospect of German dominance in Asia Minor brought 

Germany and Austria into closer sj^mpathy in their Balkan 

policies. Austria's interference in those regions 

and Aus- had been purely bad, aiming to keep the little 

trian plans Balkan statcs weak and mutually hostile, and 

at one 

especially to prevent the growth of a "Greater 
Serbia." Now (1898, 1899), Germany obtained concessions 
from Turkey for a railway from "Berlin to Bagdad," to open 
up the fabulously rich Oriental trade. A powerful Serbia, 
through which that line must pass, might have hampered 
the project. Thenceforward Germany was ready to back 
Austria unreservedly in Balkan aggression. And in return, 



THE BALKAN SEED PLOT 693 

Austria permitted herself to sink virtually into a vassal 
state of Germany in all other foreign relations. Such was 
the origin of the German dream of a "Mittel- 
Europa" empire, reaching across Europe from " Middie- 
the North Sea to the Aegean and the Black seas, Europe " 
and on through Asia Minor to the Euphrates. 

In 1908 came a step toward fulfilling the plan. Taking ad- 
vantage of internal dissensions in Turkey, Austria formally 
annexed Bosnia, in flat contradiction to her solemn . 

Austns. 

pledges. This was not only a brutal stroke at annexes 
the sanctity of treaties, but it seemed also a fatal Bosnia, 
blow to any hope for a reunion of that Slav dis- 
trict with Serbia. Serbia protested earnestly, and was 
supported by Russia. But the Kaiser "took his stand in 
shining armor by the side of his ally," as he himself put it; 
and Russia, still weak from her defeat by Japan and from 
her revolution of 1906, had to back down. Serbia was 
then forced by Austria's rough threats to make humiliating 
apologies ; but a network of secret societies at once grew 
up in Serbia pledged to hostility to the "odious and greedy 
northern neighbor who holds millions of Serb brothers in 
chains." 

Then came an event less favorable to the Teutonic 
designs. United action by the mutually hostile Balkan 
states had seemed impossible. But in 1912, Bui- Balkan 
garia, Serbia, Montenegro, and Greece suddenly Wars of 
joined in a war to drive the Turk out of Europe. ' ^^ 
Serbia was to have northern Albania, with its seaports ; 
Montenegro, the port of Scutari ; Greece, southern Albania 
and a small strip of Macedonian coast ; and Bulgaria the 
bulk of Macedonia. 

The allies won swift victories, and in a few months were 
almost at the gates of Constantinople. "Europe" inter- 
vened to arrange the peace terms. Italy, like Austria, was 
hostile to a Greater Serbia; and at the insistence of these 
powers, backed by Germany, a new Kingdom of Albania was 
created, shutting off Serbia once more from the sea she had 



694 



HOW THE WAR CAME 



reached, while Montenegro was forced, by threat of war, to 
give up to Albania Scutari, which she had conquered. Tur- 
key was to surrender, mostly to Bulgaria, her remaining terri- 
tory in Europe except for Constantinople. Germany had 
carried her points in this settlement ; but her ally, Turkey, 
had collapsed, and events were at once to show that in siding 
with Bulgaria she had "put her money on the wrong horse." 




1912 



1913 



The Balkan States. 



The treaty left Bulgaria almost the only gainer. The 
cheated allies demanded that she now share her gains with 
them. She refused ; and at once (June, 1913) followed "the 
Second Balkan War." Greece, Serbia, Montenegro, and 
Roumania attacked Bulgaria. The Turks seized the chance 
to reoccupy Adrianople, and were permitted to keep it. In 
a month Bulgaria was crushed, and a new division of booty 
was arranged. Greece won the richest prize, including the 
city of Saloniki ; but each of the other allies secured gains. 

The primitive Balkan peoples now hated one another 



GERMANY WILLS IT 695 

with an intensified ferocity. Especially did Bulgar now 
hate Serb and Greek. Serbia, too, was still cheated of her 
proper desire for an outlet on the Adriatic, her only natural 
gateway to the outside world, and she resented fiercely the 
Austrian and Italian policy which had so balked her — 
especially as Austria now shut out all her pork, and so made 
valueless her droves of pigs, her only form of wealth. 
Austria felt deeply humiliated by the outcome of the 
Second Balkan War, and was planning to redress her loss of 
prestige by striking Serbia savagely on the first occasion. 
There followed in 1913 a new and ominous stride in 
militarism. First Germany adopted a new army bill, to in- 
crease her army in peace from 650,000 to 870,000. Three 
weeks later (July 20) France raised her term of active 
service from two years to three, and Austria and Russia at 
once took like measures. Prince Lichnowsky, German am- 
bassador at London, has told us that only England's honest 
desire for peace, and her coaxing Montenegro and Serbia 
into submission at the close of the First Balkan War, pre- 
vented a world war then. A year later, England's efforts 
to a like end failed. 

m. GERMANY WILLS THE WAR 

One reason why the world drifted so complacently toward 
catastrophe was the general belief (outside diplomatic and 
military circles anyway) that, despite their armaments, the 
great "Christian" states were too good or at least too wise 
ever again to engage in war with one another merely for 
plunder — with the terrible ruin that such war must bring 
under modern conditions. And this belief was in itself a 
safeguard, in a measure. The catastrophe would at least 
have been postponed, except that one great nation did not 
share the faith in peace, or the desire for it. The willing 
hand to light the deadly fuse was Germany's. 

For half a century Germany had been ruled by a 
Prussian despotism resting upon an old bigoted and arro- 
gant oligarchy of birth, and a new, greedy, scheming 



696 HOW THE WAR CAME 

oligarchy of money. That rule had conferred on Ger- 
many many benefits. It had cared for the people as zeal- 
Prussian ously as the herdsman cares for the flocks he ex- 
miiitarism pects to shear. But in doing so it had amazingly 
transformed the old peace-loving, gentle German people. 
It had taught that docile race to bow to Authority rather 
than to Right; to believe Germany stronger, wiser, better, 
than "decaying" England, "decadent and licentious" 
France, "uncouth and anarchic" Russia, or "money-serving " 
America ; to be ready to accept a program, at the word of 
command, for imposing German Kultur upon the rest of the 
world hy force; to regard war, even aggressive war, not as 
horrible and sinful, but as beautiful, noble, desirable, and 
right, — the final measure of a nation's worth, and the 
divinely appointed means for saving the world by German 
conquest; and finally to disregard ordinary morality, 
national or individual, whenever it might interfere with the 
victory of the "Fatherland." 

"Out of 'T^^^ diseased "patriotism" began with the 

their own war-begotten Empire. As early as 1872, Von 
mouths" Schellendorf, Prussian War-Minister, wrote : — 

"Do not forget the civilizing task which Providence assigns 
us. Just as Prussia was destined to be the nucleus of Ger- 
many, so the new Germany shall be the nucleus of a future 
Empire of the West. . . . We will successively annex Den- 
mark, Holland, Belgium, . . . and finally northern France. 
. . . No coalition in the world can stop us." Leaders 
of German thought adopted this tone, until it dominated 
pulpit, press, university, and all society. Treitschke, a 
leading historian, could teach impiously : "War is part of 
the divinely appointed order. . . . War is both justifiable 
and moral, and the idea of perpetual peace is both impossi- 
ble and immoral. . . . The salvation of Germany can be 
attained only by the annihilation of the smaller states." 
And the philosopher Nietzsche exclaimed with a sort of 
ecstasy : "Ye shall love peace as a means to new wars, and 
the short peace better than the long. . . . You say a good 
cause hallows even war; but I tell you a good ivar hallows 



GERMANY WILLS IT 697 

every cause. '^ The Kaiser had long been a convert to 
this evil doctrine, and one of its noisiest preachers. Said he 
(at Bremen, March 22, 1900), — "We are the salt of the 
earth. . . . God has called us to civilize the world. . . . We 
are the missionaries of human progress." And the Crown 
Prince added this interesting interpretation: "It is only 
by trust in our good sword that we shall be able to main- 
tain that place in the sun which belongs to us." Ger- 
man school children had these doctrines drilled into them. 
Said one school manual {School and Fatherland, 1913) : 
" Germany's mission is to rejuvenate exhausted Europe by 
a diffusion of Germanic blood." And Jung Deutschland, 
official organ of the Young German League (an organization 
corresponding in a rough way to our Boy Scouts) , explained 
more specifically : " War is the noblest and holiest expression 
of human activity. For us, too, the glad, great hour of battle 
will strike. Still and deep in the German heart must live the 
joy of battle and the longing for it. Let us ridicule to the 
utmost the old women in breeches who fear war and deplore 
it as cruel and revolting. No ; war is beautiful. Its august 
sublimity elevates the human heart beyond the earthly 
and the common. In the cloud palace above sit the heroes 
Frederick the Great and Bliicher ; and all the men of action 
— the great Emperor, Moltke, Roon, Bismarck — are there 
as well, but not the old women who would take away our 
joy in war. . . . That is the heaven of young Germany.'* 

And so on almost without end. It is no pleasant 
task now to recall this monstrous ritual chanted so 
universally by the makers of opinion in a great nation 
in praise of international envy and suspicion and war. 
Nor is it recalled here to add any discredit to the 
new Germany struggling toward a better life. But the 
story carries a lesson that the world should never forget — 
a lesson less now for Germany than for her conquerors, 
" lest they forget " ; lest, in the rebound from the world 
struggle, they bow down in a worship of violence before 
some similar misshapen image of nationalism. 



698 HOW THE WAR CAME 

True, in that old Germany, a few lonely voices, like 
Ottfried Nippold, protested against this doctrine of insolent 
Protests ^^^ ruthless Might, and the Socialists of course 
few and offered a vain opposition. Indeed the bulk of 
^^^^ the peasants and artisans wished not war but 

peace; but these were silent social forces, unorganized, 
passive, and defenseless. And even these elements were 
deeply influenced by the persistent propaganda that 
England hated their country and was only waiting 
a chance to destroy it. Between 1912 and 1914, to be 
sure, the German ambassador to England, Prince Lich- 
nowsky,^ repeatedly assured his government of England's 
friendly and pacific feeling. But these communications, 
so out of tune with the purpose of the German government, 
never reached the German people. 

As Bismarck prepared his "Trilogy of Wars" thirty years 
before, of which he boasted so insolently, in order to make 
Preparation Prussia mistrcss of Germany, so after 1890, even 
for war morc deliberately, Kaiser Wilhelm and his advisers 
prepared vaster war to make Germany mistress of the world. 
They hoarded gold in the war chest ; heaped up arms and 
munitions, and huge stocks of raw materials, to manufacture 
more; secretly tried out new military inventions on a vast 
scale, — submarines, zeppelins, poison gases, new explosives; 
created a navy in a race to best England's ; bound other 
ruling houses to their own by marriage or by placing Hohen- 
zollerns directly on the throne — in Russia, Greece, Bul- 
garia, Roumania ; reorganized the Turkish Empire and 
filled offices in the army and navy there with Germans ; per- 
meated every great country, in the Old World and the New, 
with an insidious and treacherous system of spies in the 

1 This cultivated and able German Liberal, wholly free from the spirit of German 
jingoism, had been selected for the position apparently in order to blind English 
opinion as to Germany's warlike aims. When the war came, he found himself in 
disgrace with the Kaiser and the German court ; and at the opening of the second 
year of the war (August, 1916) he wrote an account of his London mission for 
private circulation among his friends, to justify himself in their eyes. A copy fell 
into the hands of the Allies during the next year, and became at once one of the most 
valuable proofs of the German guilt in forcing on the war. 



GERMANY WILLS IT 699 

guise of friendly business shielded by innocent hospitality ; 
secured control of banking syndicates and of newspapers in 
foreign lands, especially in Italy and America, so as to in- 
fluence public opinion ; and built military railroads converg- 
ing upon the boundary of Belgium. 

In June, 1914, the Kiel Canal from the Baltic to the North 
Sea was finally opened to the passage of the largest ships of 
war. Now Germany was ready, and her war lords were 
growing anxious to use their preparation before it grew stale 
— and before France and Russia should have time to put 
into effect the new army laws they had been terrified into 
adopting (page 695). Moreover, war, better than anything 
else, would quiet the rising feeling in Germany, especially 
among the Socialists, against militarism. Another set of 
circumstances made the moment a happy one for what 
the German phrase-makers had begun to call a " preventive 
war " : Russia was distracted by violent strikes of working- 
men in her cities ; France by a tumultuous resistance to her 
new army law ; and England, by an embryo civil war in 
Ireland. Germany, we know now, had seriously considered 
precipitating war on several previous occasions connected 
with colonial questions in Africa ; but her leaders prudently 
preferred a first war in which England would not be likely 
to join, so that the Teutonic empires might have only France 
and Russia to deal with at one time. In the Balkans, 
England had shown no selfish interest for many years, and 
it was easy to believe that she would not fight upon a 
Balkan question. 

And at this instant came just the occasion the German 
war lords wished. Ever since its unjust seizure by Austria 
(page 693), Bosnia had been seething with con- The occa- 
spiracies against Austrian rule. June 28, 1914, sion in the 
the heir to the Austrian throne, the Archduke 
Francis, and his wife, were assassinated while in Bosnia by 
such conspirators. Austrian papers loudly declared Serbia 
responsible, but a month passed quietly before the Austrian 
government took open action. That month, however, was 
used in secret preparation by Germany. July 5 there was 



700 HOW THE WAR CAME 

held at Potsdam a secret conference of military authorities, 
bankers, and manufacturers of munitions ; and a war 
program was decided upon. Then July 23, without warn- 
ing, Austria launched her forty-eight hour ultimatum to 
Serbia — demands that would have degraded that country 
into a mere vassal state, and which, the minutes of the 
Austrian Cabinet show, were purposely made impossible of 
acceptance. The German government supported Austria to 
the hilt, as the Kaiser had promised beforehand to do ; and 
in twelve days a world-conflagration was ablaze. 

It is not needful to retell here the complicated story of 
those twelve days. Two facts of supreme significance are 
established : 

1. England made extreme efforts to get concessions from 
Serbia, in the interests of peace, and when that little country 

did make submission more humble than could 
efforts to have been expected (reserving only her national 
keep the independence), England repeatedly asked Ger- 
many to help get Austria's acceptance of the 
terms, or at least her consent to arbitrate the remaining 
points. Failing this, England pled, in vain, that Ger- 
many herself should suggest some plan to preserve peace. 
Lichnowsky believed that if his country had wished peace, a 
settlement could easily have been secured, and he "strongly 
backed" the English proposals ; but in vain. "We insisted 
on war," he says in his account to his friends ; "the impres- 
sion grew that we wanted war under any circumstances. 
It was impossible to interpret our attitude in any other 
way." And again, "I had to support in London a policy 
the wickedness of which I recognized. That brought down 
vengeance upon me, because it was a sin against the Holy 
Ghost." 

2. The German government, which all along had secretly 
pulled the strings, now forced on the war (even when 
Germany Austria for a moment showed hesitation) by a 
wills war series of insulting ultimatums to Russia, France, 
and Belgium, each justified to the German people by glaring 



GERMANY WILLS IT 701 

falsehood. August 3, German troops invaded Belgium, as 
the easy road to Paris, despite the most solemn treaty 
obligations to respect the neutrality of that land. And the 
same day England "went in," as she had distinctly told 
Germany she would do if Belgium were attacked. 

This sadly upset German calculations. Chancellor Beth- 
mann-Hollweg had believed that "shop-keeping" England 
would refuse to fight, and he expressed bitterly to the Eng- 
lish ambassador his amazement that England should enter 
the war "just for a scrap of paper." The German govern- 
ment had blundered, and the irritating consciousness of a 
blunder called forth a frenzy of hate against England — ■ 
whose overthrow in a later war, it was now openly avowed, 
was the real German goal. "May God blast England" be- 
came the daily greeting among the German people. 

But, after all, Germany was prepared for war "to the last 
shoe-lace," and her opponents were unprepared. Least of all 
was England ready. She had no army worth men- 
tioning — only a few distant and scattered garrisons ; 
and, worse still, she had no arms for her eager volunteers and 
no factories worth mention to make munitions. Both parties 
declared they fought to establish peace. But German 
leaders made it plain that they looked only to a sort of peace 
by slavery, — a peace won by making Germany so supreme 
in the world that no other power could possibly dream of 
withstanding or disobeying her. Said Chancellor Bethmann- 
Hollweg (May 28, 1915) : "We must endure till we have 
gained every possible guarantee, so that none of our enemies 
— not alone, not united — will again dare a trial of strength 
with us." Over against this ideal of a Roman peace, Eng- 
lish statesmen set up the ideal of a peace of righteousness. 
Said Sir Edward Grey, the English Foreign Minister ; — 
"What we and our allies are fighting for is a free Europe. 
We want a Europe free, not only from the domination of one 
nationality by another, but from hectoring diplomacy and 
the peril of war, free from the constant rattling of the sword 
in the scabbard, from perpetual talk of shining armor and 
war lords. We are fighting for equal rights ; for law, justice, 



702 HOW THE WAR CAME 

peace ; for civilization throughout the world as against brute 
force." 

And, with full allowance for rhetoric and for misrepre- 
sentation, the difference was a real one. Even in England, 
to be sure, there had not been wanting in past years an 
occasional statesman or military leader to suggest, in 
private, a treacherous attack upon Germany's fleet before 
it should grow too strong ; and at times Russian and 
French statesmen had plotted for war. But in England 
and France any voice lifted openly for offensive war was 
drowned instantly in storms of indignant rebuke : Germany, 
on the other hand, led by its war-besotted prophets, had 
been making ready zealously for wars of greed. 



CHAPTER XLIV 

AMERICA AND THE WAR 

It is not the place of this vohime to tell the story of the 
war further than needful to explain America's part in it. 
The Germans had planned a short war. They expected 
(1) to go through Belgium swiftly with little opposition, and 
to take Paris within four weeks ; (2) then to swing their 
strength against Russia before that unwieldy power could get 
into the war effectively, and crush her ; and (3) , with the 
Channel forts at command, to bring England easily to her 
knees, if she should really take part. 

Thanks to Belgium, the first of these expectations fell 
through — and the others fell with it. The Germans had 
allowed six days to march through Belgium. But for sixteen 
days little Belgium held back mighty Germany. When 
the French began mobilization, after August 2, they began 
it to meet an honest attack through Lorraine ; but before the 
Belgians were quite crushed, the French contrived to shift 
enough force to the north so that, along with a poorly 
equipped "Expeditionary Army" of 100,000 from England, 
they managed to delay the advance through northern France 
for three weeks more — ground for which the Germans 
had allowed eight days. Tremendously outnumbered, 
outflanked, trampled into the dust in a ceaseless series of 
desperate battles, the thin lines of Allied survivors fell back 
doggedly toward the Marne. There September 6, Battle of 
when the boastful invaders were in sight of the **^® Marne 
towers of Paris, only 20 miles away, the French and English 
turned at bay in a colossal battle along a two-hundred mile 
front. The Battle of the Marne wrecked the German plan. 
To save themselves from destruction the invaders then 

703 



704 AMERICA AND THE WAR 

retreated hastily to the Hne of the Aisne, whence the 
exhausted AUies failed to dislodge them. Both sides 
"dug in," along a 360-mile front from Switzerland to the 
North Sea. Then began a trench warfare, new in history. 
The positions stabilized, and, on the whole, in spite of 
repeated and horrible slaughter, were not materially 
changed until the final months four years later. 

While England's first heroic army died devotedly to 
gain their country time, England reorganized herself for 
England's War, and eventually put into the field a splendid 
sea power fighting force of six million men — a million 
ready for the second year. From the first, too, England's 
superb navy swept the seas, keeping the boastful German 
dreadnaughts bottled up in the South Baltic, and 
gradually running down the few German raiders that at 
first escaped to prey on English commerce. Except for 
the English navy, Germany must have won the war before 
the end of the second summer. England did not enforce her 
blockade of Germany rigidly, in the first months, for fear 
of offending unsettled opinion in America ; but America's 
resources in food and munitions were for the most part 
closed to Germany, and were kept fully available for the 
Allies. 

Meantime, the war was spreading. Within the first 
few weeks, England's distant daughter-commonwealths — - 
A "World Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, 
^" and even her subject India — were rousing them- 

selves nobly to defend their common civilization. Japan, 
England's ally in the Orient, entered the war, too, to 
seize Germany's holdings in China and in the northern 
Pacific. Turkey had openly joined the Teutonic powers ; 
and, in the second autumn, Bulgaria did so, hoping to 
wreak vengeance on Serbia for 1913 and to make herself 
the dominant Balkan state. In the spring of that same 
year, after driving a hard bargain for territory with the 
Allies in a secret Pact of London, Italy broke away 
from the Triple Alliance and declared war on Austria. 



THE YEARS 1914, 1915 705 

On the whole, however, the close of the first two years 
saw great gains for Germany. The Russian armies, after 
gallant fighting, betrayed by generals in the field 
and by a traitorous pro-German war oflice at success in 
home, had suffered absolutely indescribable losses ; *^® ^^* 
and Serbia, after heroic resistance, had been wiped 
from the map. Germany now dominated a solid broad belt 
of territory from Berlin and Brussels and Warsaw to Bag- 
dad and Persia, map, page 725. True, she began to feel terri- 
bly the blockade of the English navy. Her stocks of fats, 
rubber, cotton, and copper were running low, and her 
poorer classes were suffering from undernourishment — as 
was shown by a horrible increase in the infant death rate. 
But the ruling classes felt no pinch, and looked hopefully 
now to the domination of the East to retrieve the markets. 

From the first the warfare in the field was marked 
by new and ever more terrible ways of fighting, with 
increasing ferocity and horror from month to j^^^ 
month. Ordinary cannon were replaced by methods of 
huge new guns whose high explosives blasted "^^^ "^ 
the whole landscape into indescribable and irretrievable 
ruin — burying whole battalions alive, and forming great 
craters where snipers found the best shelter in future 
advances. Ordinary defense works were elaborated into 
many lines of connected trenches beneath the earth, 
protected by mazy entanglements of barbed wire and 
strengthened at intervals by bomb-proof "dugouts" and 
underground chambers of heavy timbers and cement. To 
plow through these intrenchments, cavalry gave way to mon- 
strous, heavily armored motor-tanks. New guns belched 
deadly poison gases, slaying whole regiments in horrible stran- 
gling torture when the Germans first used this devilish device, 
and infernal "flame-throwers" wrapped whole ranks in 
liquid fire. Scouting was done, and gunfire directed, by air- 
planes equipped with new apparatus for wireless telegraphy 
and for photography ; and daily these aerial scouts, singly or 
in fleets, met in deadly combat ten thousand feet above the 



706 AMERICA AND THE WAR 

ground, — combat that ended only when one or both went 
hurthng down in flames to crashing destruction. Worse than 
these terrors even, the soldiers dreaded the beastly filthiness 
of trench war : the never absent smell of rotting human flesh ; 
the torture of vermin ; the dreary monotony. 

One other phase of the war compelled from the first 
the attention of the world even outside Europe. This 
German ^^^ ^^^ policy of " FHghtf ulness " deliberately 
" Fright- adopted by the German High Command. For 
fulness centuries, international law had been building 

up rules of "civilized" war, to protect non-combatants 
and to try to preserve some shreds of humanity even 
among the fighters. But the military rulers of Germany, 
in oflBcial war manuals, had for years referred to such 
"moderation " as "flabby sentimentality," — and indeed they 
had already given to the world one remarkable practical 
application of their own doctrine. In 1900 a force of Ger- 
man soldiers set out to join forces from other European 
countries and from the United States in restoring order 
in China, after the massacre of Europeans there in the 
Boxer Rebellion. July 27 the Kaiser bade his troops 
farewell at Bremerhaven in a set address. In the course 
of that brutal speech he commanded them: "Show no 
mercy ! Take no prisoners ! As the Huns made a name for 
themselves which is still mighty in tradition, so may you by 
your deeds so fix the name of German in China that no 
Chinese shall ever again dare to look at a German askance." 

At the opening of the World War, this "Hun" policy was 
put into effect in Western Europe. Belgium and north- 
eastern France were purposely devastated. Whole villages 
of innocent non-combatants were wiped out, — men, 
women, children, — burned in their houses or shot and 
bayoneted if they crept forth. All this, not by the passionate 
fury of brutalized soldiers,' but by deliberate order of polished 

1 It is a relief to be assured by an excellent authority (Philip Gibbs, the English 
war correspondent, in his recent, Now It Can Be Told) that many at least of the 
stories of outrage by individual German soldiers, widely accepted as such stories 
were during the war, are without basis in fact. 



ATTEMPT AT NEUTRALITY 707 

soft-living "gentlemen," just to break the morale of the 
enemy, to make it easy to hold conquered territory with 
small forces, and to intimidate neighboring small peoples, — ■ 
Danes and Dutch. So, too, German airplanes bombed 
hospitals and Red Cross trains, assassinating doctors and 
nurses along with the wounded soldiers ; and soon the 
submarines began to torpedo hospital ships, clearly marked 
as such (on suspicion, perhaps, that such vessels carried 
munitions). No wonder that even neutral lands began to 
know the German no longer as the kindly "Fritz" but only 
as "Hun"or "Boche." 

To the United States, even more than to France or 
England, the war came as a surprise; and for some 
time its purposes and its origin were obscured America's 
by a skillful German propaganda in our press " neutrai- 
and on the platform. President Wilson issued '*^ 
the usual proclamation of neutrality, and followed this with 
unusual and solemn appeals to the American people for a real 
neutrality of feeling. For two years the administration 
clung to this policy. Any other course was made difficult for 
the President by the fact that a good many members of 
Congress were either pro-German, or at least bitterly anti- 
English, or extreme pacifists. Moreover, the President 
seems to have hoped nobly that if the United States could 
keep apart from the struggle, it might, at the close, render 
mighty service establishing lasting world peace. 

True, the best informed men and women saw at once that 
France and England were waging America's war against a 
militaristic despotism. Tens of thousands of young Ameri- 
cans, largely college men, made their way to the fighting 
line, as volunteers in the Canadian regiments, in the French 
"Foreign Legion," or in the "air service"; and hundreds 
of thousands more blushed with shame daily that other 
and weaker peoples should struggle and suffer in our cause 
while we stood idly by. But to millions the dominant 
feeling was a deep thankfulness that our sons were safe 
from slaughter, our homes free from the horror of war. 
Vast portions of the American people had neither cared 



708 AMERICA AND THE WAR 

nor known about the facts back of the war : to such, that 
mighty struggle was merely "a bloody European squabble." 
It was not altogether easy to break with the century -long 
tradition of a happy aloofness from all Old- World quarrels. 

Such indifference or apathy, however, needed a moral 
force to give it positive strength. And this moral force for 
neutrality was not wholly lacking. Many ardent workers, 
and some leaders, in all the great reform movements believed 
that in any war the attention of the nation must be diverted 
from the pressing need of progress at home. To them the 
first American gun would sound the knell, for their day, of all 
the reforms that they had long battled for. Still breathless 
from their lifelong wrestlings with vested wrongs, they failed 
to see that German militarism and despotism had suddenly 
towered into the one supreme peril to American life. And 
so many noble men, and some honored names, cast their 
weight for neutrality. And then, cheek by jowl with this 
misled but honorable idealism, there flaunted itself a coarse 
pro-German sentiment wholly un-American. Sons and 
grandsons of men who had fled from Germany to escape 
despotism were heard now as apologists for the most danger- 
ous despotism and the most barbarous war methods the 
modern world had ever seen. Organized and obedient to the 
word of command, this element made many weak politicians 
truckle to the fear of "the German vote." Unhappily, 
too, we have always with us those who blindly hate England. 

These forces for neutrality were strengthened by one other 
selfish motive. The country had begun to feel a vast busi- 
ness prosperity. Some forms of business were demoralized 
for a time ; but soon the European belligerents were all 
clamoring to buy all our spare ])roducts at our own prices, — ■ 
munitions of war, food, clothing, raw materials. To be sure, 
the English navy soon shut out Germany from direct trade, 
though she long continued an eager customer, indirectly, 
through Holland and Denmark ; but in any case the Allies 
called ceaselessly for more than we could produce. Non- 
employment vanished ; wages rose by bounds ; new fortunes 
piled up as by Aladdin's magic. A busy peo])le, growing 



ATTEMPT AT NEUTRALITY 709 

richer and busier day by day, ill-informed about the real 
causes of the war, needed some mighty incentive to turn it 
from the easy, peaceful road of prosperous industry into the 
stern, rugged paths of self-denial and war — even though 
certain huge financial interests may secretly have intrigued 
for war, to make safer their investments in French and 
English bonds. A little wisdom, and Germany might 
readily have held America bound to neutrality in acts at 
least, if not always in feeling. 

Bid more and more Germany made neutrality impossible. 
From the first the German government actively stirred 
up bad feeling toward America among its own 
people because Americans used the usual and makes 
legal rights of citizens of a neutral power to sell °f"*'^^^*y 

• • !• 1 1 IT /-^ diflScult 

munitions oj ivar to the belligerents. Germany 
had securely supplied herself in advance, and England's 
navy now shut her out from the trade in any case. 
So she tried, first by cajolery and then by threats, to 
keep Americans from selling to her enemies — which 
would have left them at her mercy, unprepared as they 
were. The legal right of a neutral to sell muni- saie of 
tions she could not question. She demanded of munitions 
us not that we comply with international law, but that we 
change it in such a way as to insure her victory. For the 
American government to have forbidden trade in munitions 
during the war^ would have been not neutrality, but a direct 
and deadly act of war against the Allies. Worse still, it 
would have fastened militarism upon the world directly. 
For neutrals to renounce trade in munitions (until all such 
trade is controlled by a world federation) would be at once 
and forever to hand over the world to the nation with the 
largest armaments and munition factories. Very properly 
the American government refused firmly to notice these 
arrogant demands. 

One phase of German frightfulness came home especially 
to America. This was a new and barbarous submarine war- 
fare, with its invasion of neutral rights and murder of 
neutral lives. U-craft were not very dangerous to war- 



710 AMERICA AND THE WAR 

ships when such vessels were on their guard. Unarmed 
merchantmen they could destroy almost at will. But 

if a U-boat summoned a merchantman to sur- 
marine and render, the merchantman might possibly sink the 
merchant submarine by one shot from a concealed gun, 

and in any case the U-boat had little room for 
prisoners. Submarine warfare upon merchant ships is neces- 
sarily barbarous and in conflict with all the principles of inter- 
national law. If it is to be efficient, the U-boat must sink 
without warning. In the American Civil War, when the 
Confederate Alabama destroyed hundreds of Northern mer- 
chant ships, it scrupulously cared for the safety of the crews 
and passengers. But from the first the German submarines 
torpedoed English and French peaceful merchant ships with- 
out notice, so that little chance was given even for women and 
children to get into the lifeboats. Then the second year of 
the war saw a sudden expansion of this horrible form of mur- 
der. In February of 1915 Germany proclaimed a " submarine 
blockade " of the British Isles. She drew a broad zone on the 
high seas and declared that any merchant ship, even those of 
neutral nations, found within those waters, would be sunk 
without warning. Three months later the world's skepti- 
The cism at that announcement was shattered. May 

Lusitama 7^ |^jjg great English liner Lusitania was torpedoed 
without any attempt to save life. Nearly twelve hundred 
non-combatants, many of them women and children, were 
drowned. 

One hundred and fourteen of the murdered passengers 
were American citizens. And now indeed from much of 
America there went up a fierce cry for war ; but large parts of 
the country, remote from the seaboard, were still indifferent, 
and shameless apologists were not lacking for even this 
dastardly massacre. President Wilson, still zealous for 
peace, used every resource of diplomacy to induce Germany 
to abandon her horrible submarine methods, — pointing out 
distinctly, at the same time, in his series of four "Lusitania 
Notes" that persistence in that policy would force America 
to fight. The German government answered with quibbles, 



THE LUSITANIA 711 

cynical falsehoods, and contemptuous neglect. Other mer- 
chant vessels were sunk, and finally (March, 1916) the sink- 
ing of the Sussex, an English passenger ship, again 
involved the murder of American citizens. Presi- 
dent Wilson's note to Germany took a still sterner tone and 
specifically declared that one more such act would cause 
him to break off diplomatic relations. Germany now 
seemed to give way. She promised, grudgingly and with 
loopholes for future use, to sink no more passenger or 
merchant ships — unless they should attempt to escape 
capture — without providing for the safety of passengers 
and crews (May 4). This episode, running over into the 
third year, closed the first stage of this controversy. Presi- 
dent Wilson seemed to have won a victory for Germany 
civilization. As he afterward complained, the promises 
precautions taken by the Germans to save *™^° ™®°* 
neutrals or non-combatants proved "distressingly meager," 
but for some time "a certain degree of restraint was 
observed." 

In this interval, came the American presidential cam- 
paign of 1916. Mr. Wilson had been renominated by 
acclamation. He drew much strength in the The 
West and with the working classes from the fact American 
that he had "kept us out of war"; while at the election of 
same time every voter with a German name ^®^® 
received circular after circular from "German-American" 
societies urging opposition to him as a foe to "the Father- 
land." The Republican party seemed at first reunited. 
Mr. Roosevelt, having failed to win the Republican nomina- 
tion, declined to run again as a Progressive, and urged his 
old followers to support the regular nominee, Charles Evans 
Hughes, who had resigned from the Supreme Court to accept 
the nomination. 

Mr. Hughes had an honorable record. He was a high- 
minded gentleman, and had always shown strong sympathy 
with progressive movements. He and Mr. Wilson, it was 
sometimes said, were much the same type of man. But Mr. 



712 AMERICA AND THE WAR 

Wilson, so far, had dominated the leaders of his party ; and 
Mr. Hughes in this campaign — like the usual candidate — ■ 
put himself too completely "in the hands of his friends." 
Certainly he was far from showing anything of his old stand 
for reform, or of the splendid leadership he was to manifest 
in the critical period after the war. Neither his platform 
nor his speeches took positive stand upon the war ^ or upon 
any progressive movement at home. Instead he relied upon 
calls for protective tariffs and upon negative criticism of 
Mr. Wilson's policies. The Republican "Old Guard" were 
i^j. once more in full control, and they were so 

Wilson's blindly confident as to show their hand freely, 
ree ec ion Progressive leaders were grossly slighted, and 
thousands of Progressive Republicans stayed at home in 
disgust. In July Mr. Hughes could probably have been 
elected overwhelmingly . In November, by a close squeeze 
in a small vote, the victory went to Mr. Wilson. 

No sooner had the dust of the campaign cleared away than 
the American people began to find indisputable proofs of 

new treacheries and new attacks by Germany, 
intrigue even witliin American borders. Official representa- 
in neutral tives of Germany in the United States, protected 

by their diplomatic position, had placed their hire- 
lings as spies and plotters throughout the land. They had used 
German money, with the approval of the German government, 
to bribe American officials and even to "influence" Congress. 
They had paid public speakers to foment distrust and hatred 
toward the Allies. They had hired agitators to stir up strikes 
and riots in order to paralyze industries. They incited to 
insurrection in San Domingo, Haiti, and Cuba, so as to dis- 
turb American peace. They paid wretches to blow up rail- 
way bridges, ships, and munition plants, with the loss of 
millions of dollars of property and with the murder of hun- 
dreds of peaceful American workers. Each week brought 
fresh proof of such outrage — more and more frequently, 

' Mr. Roosevelt was unreservedly for war with Germany; but he was allowed 
only a carefully guarded part in the campaign. 



GERMANY MAKES NEUTRALITY IMPOSSIBLE 713 

formal proof in the courts — and finally President Wilson 
dismissed the Austrian ambassador (who had been directly 
implicated) and various guilty officers connected with the 
German embassy. 

All this turned attention more and more to the hos- 
tility to America plainly avowed for years by German 
leaders. Said the Kaiser himself to the American The danger 
ambassador (October 22, 1915), at a time when to America 
our government was showing extreme gentleness in calling 
Germany to account for her murder of peaceful American 
citizens on the high seas, — "America had better look out. 
... / shall stand no nonsense from America after this 
war.'' Other representative Germans threatened more 
specifically that when England had been conquered, 
Germany, unable to indemnify herself in exhausted Europe 
for her terrible expenses, would take that indemnity from 
the rich and un warlike United States. It came home to us 
that our fancied security — unprepared for war as we were — 
was due only to the protecting shield of England's fleet. If 
Germany came out victor from the European struggle, we 
must give up our unmilitaristic life, and turn our country 
permanently into a huge camp, on the European model — ■ 
and there was doubt whether time would be given to form 
such a camp. German militaristic despotism and peace for 
free peoples could not exist in the same world. 

President Wilson strove still to avoid war. At the same 
time he had begun to speak solemn warning to our own 
people that we could not keep out of the struggle president 
unless peace could be secured soon and upon a Wilson 
just basis. December 22, he sent to all the belligerents 
warring governments a note asking them to state to state 
their aims. The German government's reply was * ^" ^™^ 
plainly evasive. The Allies, with apparent sincerity, 
demanded only "restoration and reparation," with an 
adjustment of disputed territories according to the will of 
the inhabitants, and "guarantees " for future safety against 
German aggression. Then January 22, 1917, the President 
read to Congress a notable address proposing a League of 



714 AMERICA AND THE WAR 

Nations to enforce Peace, not a peace of despotic and irre- 
sponsible governments, but a peace made by free peoples 
(among whom the small nations should have their full and 
equal voice) and "made secure by the organized major 
force of mankind." 

Germany had ready a new fleet of enlarged submarines, 
and she was about to resume her barbarous warfare upon 
Germany neutrals. She knew this might join the United 
renews States to her foes ; but she held us impotent in 

resMcted " War, and believed she could keep us busied at 
U-boat home. To this last end, through her ambassador 

warfare ^^ Washington — while he was still enjoying our 

hospitality — she had secretly been trying, as we learned a 
little later, to get Mexico and Japan to join in an attack 
upon us, ^promising them aid and huge portions of our ivestern 
territory. January 31, the German government gave a two- 
weeks notice that it was to renew its "unrestricted" sub- 
marine policy, explaining to its own people, with moral 
callousness, why it had for a time appeared to yield to Ameri- 
can pressure — and ofi^ering to America an insulting privi- 
lege of sending one ship a week to England, provided it were 
painted in stripes of certain colors and width, and provided it 
followed a certain narrow ocean lane marked out by Ger- 
many. President Wilson at once dismissed the German am- 
bassador, according to his promise of the preceding March, 
recalled our ambassador, Gerard, from Berlin, and appeared 
before Congress to announce, in a solemn address, the com- 
plete severance of diplomatic relations — expressing, how- 
ever, a faint hope that the German government might still 
refrain from compelling us, by some "overt act," to repel 
force by force. March 12, after a number more of American 
citizens had been murdered at sea^ he placed guards on 
our merchant vessels. Germany announced that such 
guards if captured would be treated as pirates. Now the 

' Besides the eight American vessels sunk before March, 1916, eight had been 
sunk in the one month from February 3 to March 2, 1917. During the two months, 
February and March, 105 Norwegian vessels were sunk, with the loss of 328 lives. 
By April 3, 1917, according to figures compiled by the United States government. 



WILSONS WAR MESSAGE 715 

temper of the nation was changing swiftly. Apathy 
vanished. Direct and open opposition to war there still 
was from pro-Germans and from extreme pacifists, includ- 
ing the organization of the Socialist party ; but the great 
majority of the nation roused itself to defend the rights 
of mankind against a dangerous government running 
amuck, and turned its eyes confidently to the President 
for a signal. And April 2 President Wilson America 
appeared before the new Congress, met in special " soes in " 
session, to ask it to declare that we were now at war with 
Germany. April 6, by overwhelming votes, that declara- 
tion was adopted. 

America went to war not to avenge slights to its "honor," 
or merely to protect the property of its citizens, or even 
merely to protect their lives at sea. America went to war 
not merely in self-defense. We did war for this, but more 
in defense of free government, in defense of civilization, in 
defense of humanity and in hope of establishing a lasting 
world peace. Said the President's war message : 

"Neutrality is no longer feasible or desirable, when the peace 
of the world is involved, and the freedom of its peoples, and when 
the menace to that peace and freedom lies in the existence of 
autocratic governments backed by organized force which is con- 
trolled wholly by their will, not the will of their people. . . . We 
have no quarrel with the German people. ... A steadfast concert 
for peace can never be maintained except by a partnership of 
democratic nations. No autocratic government could be trusted 
to keep faith within it. Only free peoples . . . can prefer the 
interests of mankind to any narrow interests of their own. . . . 

"We are glad ... to fight for the ultimate peace of the world 
and for the liberation of its peoples, the German people included. . . . 
The world must be made safe for democracy. . . . We have no 
selfish ends. We desire no conquests, no dominion. We seek 
no indemnities for ourselves, no material compensations for the 
sacrifices we shall freely make. . . . The right is more precious 

686 neutral vessels had been sunk by Germany without counting American ships. 
When we turn to the still more important question of lives, we count up 226 Ameri- 
can citizens slain by the action of German submarines before April, 1917. Be- 
fore the close of the war, 5000 Norwegian sailors were murdered so. 



716 AMERICA AND THE WAR 

than peace ; and we shall fight for the things which we have always 
carried nearest our hearts — for democracy, for the right of those 
who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments, 
for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion 
of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and 
safety to all nations." 

Splendid was the awakening of America, following on the 
President's call. The pacifist Bryan had resigned from the 
The Cabinet in June of 1915, as a protest against the 

response President's firmness in pressing the Lusitania 
President's matter: but now he promptly declared, "The 
^^^ quickest road to peace is through the war to 

victory"; and he telegraphed the President an offer of 
his services in any capacity. Henry Ford, who had led a 
shipload of peace enthusiasts to Europe the year before, to 
plead with the warring governments there, now placed his 
huge automobile factories absolutely at the disposal of the 
government, and became a valued worker in one of the 
new War Boards. Charles Edward Russell, ' choosing to be 
an American rather than a Socialist if he could not be both,' 
served on a great Commission to Russia, and on his return 
supported and explained the war with voice and pen. 
Upton Sinclair in his Weekly eloquently defended the war 
and championed the President as the leader of the world's 
moral sentiment. The great majority of Americans of 
German birth or descent also rallied promptly to the flag of 
the land they had chosen. Most important of all, the 
organized wage-earners spoke with emphasis and unity for 
America and democracy : in November the American 
Federation by a vote of 21,579 local unions as against 402, 
organized the Alliance for Labor and Democracy to support 
the war. 

And now the war spread more widely still. Cuba at once 
followed the example of the United States in declaring war 
The war against Germany, and most of the countries of 
spreads South and Central America either took the same 
action within a few months or at least broke off diplomatic 



THE YEARS 1916-1917 717 

relations with the Central European Powers. Portugal 
had entered the war in 1916, because of her alliance with 
England. China and Siam now came in. This lining up of 
the world had moral value, and no small bearing upon the 
matter of supplies. In particular, the German ships which, 
since the beginning of the war, had been seeking refuge in 
the harbors of these new belligerents were now seized for 
the Allies, and helped to make good the losses due to sub- 
marines. None of these powers except America, how- 
ever, were to have much direct effect upon military 
operations. 

Those operations had continued favorable to Germany 
through 1916, True, the East front offered two promising 
surprises on the side of the Allies, but each was Russian 
followed by swift collapse. (1) Russia at first coUapse 
showed remarkable recovery, and in June won sweeping 
successes against the Austrians. By July, however, her 
supplies of ammunition had again given out, and she 
was saved from complete overthrow, for the moment, 
only by sacrificing Roumania. (2) For now that Roumania 
country had entered the war, to recover from crushed 
Austria the Roumanian province of Transylvania. But 
the Tsar had induced her to go in too soon by promises of 
support that was never given. The German traitorous 
court party at Petrograd, now in control of the weak Tsar, 
planned a separate peace with Germany, and intended 
deliberately to buy easy terms by betraying Roumania. 
Bulgarians and Teutons entered that doomed country 
from south and west. December 16 the capital fell, and 
only the rigors of winter enabled the Roumanian army 
to keep a hold upon a narrow strip of its country. A 
large Allied army at Saloniki did not stir, because if it left 
its base, it was in peril of being stabbed in the back by 
Constantine of Greece; and the Tsar vetoed all proposals 
of effective measures against that fellow monarch. 

And, in spite of America's entry into the war, Germany 
continued to win through 1917 also. Russia did drop out. 
The Tsar's ministers had maddened the Petrograd populace 



718 AMERICA AND THE WAR 

by permitting or preparing breakdown in the distribution of 
food. March 11, the populace rose. The troops joined 
The Russian ^^^ rioters. Absolutely deserted by all classes, 
Revolution Nicholas abdicated on March 15. The Liberal 
of 1917 leaders of the Duma proclaimed a provisional 
government, which in a few weeks (June, 1917) was replaced 
by a Socialist-democratic government led by 
Kerensky, an emotional, well-meaning enthusiast, 
altogether unfit to grapple with the tremendous difficulties 
before Russia. Finland, the Ukrainian districts, and Siberia 
were showing signs of breaking away from central Russia. 
Everywhere the starving and desperate peasants had begun 
to appropriate the lands of the great estates, sometimes 
quietly, sometimes with violence and outrage. Transporta- 
tion was broken down, and the crude industrial system was 
gone. The army was completely demoralized. The peas- 
ant soldiers, so often betrayed by their officers, were eager 
for peace, that they might go home to get their share of 
the land. In all large cities, extreme Socialists (Bolshevists) 
began to win support for a further revolution. 

Kerensky battled against these conditions for a while with 
some show of success. He tried zealously to continue the 
war, and, in July, he did induce part of the demoralized 
army to take up the offensive once more. But after slight 
successes, the military machine collapsed. Whole regiments 
and brigades mutinied, murdered their despotic officers, 
broke up, and went to their homes. The remaining army 
was intoxicated with the new political "liberty," and frater- 
nized with the few German regiments left to watch it. Dur- 
ing this chaos, real power, over nearly all Russia, fell to new 
councils of workmen's delegates (with representatives also 
The Boishe- from the army and the peasantry) . The Bolshe- 
viki yjj^j gg^^ that these " Soviets," rather than the 

old agencies, had become the real government, and by 
shrewd political campaigning they captured these bodies. 
Kerensky fled, and (November 7, 1917) the Bolsheviki, led 
by Nikolai Lenin and Leon Trotsky, seized the govern- 
ment, announcing their determination to make peace upon 



GERMAN GAINS IN 1917 , 719 

the principle of "no indemnities and no annexations." The 
AlHes felt deeply indignant at the " betrayal " of the cause 
of freedom ; but it is clear now that no Russian And a sepa- 
government could have continued the struggle. ^^^^ p®"*^® 
The Russian people had borne greater sacrifice than any 
other ; they were absolutely without resources ; they were 
unspeakably weary of war; and they failed to understand 
that German victory would mean the return of Tsarism. 

On the West front, both French and English had planned 
vigorous offensives for the early spring. But the French 
attack along the Aisne was heavily repulsed, and the army 
was so demoralized that it could undertake no further 
important operations during the season. There was con- 
siderable lack of confidence in the commanding officers, 
with consequent demoralization among the common soldiers. 
This of itself made English success doubtful. Early in the 
spring the Germans had executed an extended ^j^^ 
withdrawal in front of the British lines from their ' ffinden- 
trenches of two years' warfare to a new "Hinden- ^^^ ^'°® 
burg Line," which, they boasted, had been prepared so as 
to be absolutely impregnable to any assault. This ma- 
neuver delayed the British attack for some weeks. Heavy 
guns had to be brought up to the new positions over terri- 
tory rendered almost impassable by the Germans in their 
retreat, and new lines of communication had to be estab- 
lished. These things were accomplished, however, with a 
rapidity and efficiency wholly surprising to the German 
High Command ; and in the subsequent British attack 
(April-November) the Germans were saved only by the 
fact that now they were able to transfer all their best 
divisions from the Russian front. 

The Russian collapse had been caused in part by skillful 
German propaganda among the Russian soldiers that the 
war was the Tsar's war, or at least a capitalist The itaUan 
war, and that their German brothers were ready collapse 
to give the new Russia a fair peace. Now, like tactics 
were used against the Italians, until their military machine, 



720 AMERICA AND THE WAR 

too, went to pieces. Then the Austrians suddenly took 
the offensive. They tore a huge gap in the Italian lines, 
took 200,000 prisoners and a great part of Italy's heavy 
artillery, and advanced into Venetia, driving the rem- 
nants of the Italian army before them in rout. French 
and British reinforcements were hurried in ; and the 
Teutons proved unable to force the Piave River. Italy had 
not been put out of the war as Russia had been ; but for 
the next six months, until well into the next year, the most 
that she could do, even with the help of Allied forces sadly 
needed elsewhere, was to hold her new line. 

The brightest phase of the year's struggle was at the point 
where there had seemed the greatest peril. Germany's new 
The failure Submarine warfare had indeed destroyed an enor- 
of the mous shipping tonnage, and for a few months 

su marine j^^^ promised to make good the threat of starving 
England into surrender. But an admirable English con- 
voy system was organized to protect important merchant 
fleets ; shipbuilding was speeded up to supply the place of 
tonnage sunk ; submarine chasers and patrol boats waged 
relentless, daring, and successful war against the treacherous 
and barbarous craft of the enemy. America sent five battle- 
ships to reinforce the British Grand Fleet and a much more 
considerable addition to the anti-submarine fleet ; and 
newly created American shipyards had begun to launch new 
cargo ships in ever increasing numbers, upon a scale never 
before known to the world. The Allies were kept supplied 
with food and other necessaries enough to avert any supreme 
calamity, and before September, 1917, the menace — in its 
darkest form — had passed. It had become plain that sub- 
marines were not to be the decisive factor in the war. 

And now America was slowly getting into the struggle — 
slowly, and yet more swiftly than either friend or foe had 
America dreamed possible. The general expectation had 
gets into been that, totally unprepared as the United 
t e war States was, her chief contribution would be in 
money, ships, and supplies. These she gave in generous 



A RACE BETWEEN GERMANY AND AMERICA 721 



measure (chapter xlvi, below). But also, from the first, 
the government planned military participation on a huge 
scale. Congress was induced to pass a "selective con- 
scription" act; and as early as June a small contingent 
of excellent fighters was sent to France — mainly from 
the old regular army — under the command of General 

John J. Pershing. In 

the early fall, new regi- 
ments were transported 
(some 300,000 before 
Christmas) , and per- 
haps half a million more 
were in training camps. 
By 1920, it was then 
thought by the hope- 
ful, America could place 
three million men in the 
field in Europe, or even 
five million, and so de- 
cide the war. Events 
made a supreme exertion 
necessary even sooner, 
and America met the 
need. 

France could stand 
one year more of war, 
but she was very nearly 
"bled white," as Ger- 
many had boasted. Her 
working classes were 
war-weary and discour- 
aged, and the Germans had infected all classes in that 
country more or less successfully with their poisonous and 
baseless propaganda to the effect that England was using 
France to fight her battles, and that she herself prench 
was bearing far less than her proper share of the discourage- 
burden. French morale was in danger of giving ™^° 
way, as Russian and Italian had given way. It was saved 




General John J. Pershing- 



722 AMERICA AND THE WAR 

by two things : by the tremendous energy of the aged 
Clemenceau — "The Tiger" — whom the crisis had called 
to the premiership ; and by the appearance in France, none 
too soon, of American soldiers in large numbers. 

Even in England, peace talk began to be heard, not merely 
among the workers but here and there in all ranks of society. 
Peace talk ^^^ among the laborers this dangerous leaning 
even in was fearfully augmented when the Russian Bolshe- 
°^^ viki published the copies of the "Secret Treaties" 

between England, France, Italy, and the Tsar's government, 
revealing the Allied governments as purchasing one another's 
aid by promises of territorial and commercial spoils. For the 
first time the charge against the Allies that on their side too 
the war was "a capitalist and imperialist war" was given 
some color of presumption. 

In Germany, too, the masses had become war-weary. 
The entire generation of their young men was threatened 
Conditions witli extinction, and their children were being 
in Germany pitifully stuuted from lack of food. The "Inde- 
pendent Socialists," as Ludendorff now tells us, had spread 
among the people a peace propaganda which crippled 
seriously the efficiency of the army. The Reichstag had 
even adopted resolutions for peace without annexations 
or indemnities. But the junkers and great capitalists were 
still bent upon complete military victory, which the;^ 
seemed to see within their grasp. The German warlords 
at once made it plain that they recognized no binding force 
in the Reichstag resolutions, and once more they brought 
the nation to their way of thinking. They could now 
turn all their strength as never before upon France and 
England, and they were confident they could win the war 
before American armies could become an important factor. 
The Allies, they insisted, had not shipping enough to bring 
the Americans in any numbers ; still less to bring the supplies 
needful for them ; and then the Americans "couldn't fight" 
anyway without years of training. 

Thus in 1918 the war became a race between Germany 
and America. Could America put decisive numbers in 



THE FOURTEEN POINTS 723 

action on the West front before Germany could deliver 
a knock-out blow? While winter held the German armies 
inactive, the British and American navies carried 
each week thousands of American soldiers to between 
France, English ships carrying much the greater Germany 
number. And during these same months America 
and England won a supremely important victory in the 
moral field. In the summer of 1917 the Pope had pro- 
posed peace negotiations on the basis of July, 1914 — 
before the war began. Woodrow Wilson answered, for 
America and for the Allies, that there could be no safe peace 
with the faithless Hohenzollern government. This cleared 
the air, and made plain at least one of the "guarantees" the 
Allies must secure. Then Austria, war- weary and under a 
new Emperor, suggested peace negotiations in a conciliatory 
note — possibly hoping also to weaken Allied morale. In- 
stead, in two great speeches. Premier Lloyd George and 
President Wilson stated the war aims of the Allies with a 
studious moderation which conciliated wavering elements in 
their own countries, and at the same time with a keen logic 
that put Germany in the wrong even more clearly than before 
in the eyes of the world and drove deeper the wedge between 
the German government and the German people. Lloyd 
George (January 6, 1918) demanded complete reparation 
for Belgium, but disclaimed intention to exact indemnities 
other than payment for injuries done by Germany in ^j^g 
defiance of international law. President Wilson's ' Fourteen 
address contained his famous Fourteen Points, 
which were soon accepted apparently throughout the 
Allied world as a charter of a coming world peace. 

1. "Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at; after which, 
diplomacy shall proceed always ... in the public view." 2. Ab- 
solute freedom of the seas (outside territorial waters) in peace 
and in war, except where they may be closed by international 
action. 3. Removal, so far as possible, of economic barriers. 
4. Disarmament by international action. 5. An "absolutely 
impartial adjustment of all colonial claims . . . the interests of 
peoples concerned to have equal weight with the equitable claim 



724 AMERICA AND THE WAR 

of the government whose title is to be determined." 6. Evacua- 
tion of all Russian territory, and ... "a sincere welcome into 
the society of free nations under institutions of her own choosing, 
[with] assistance also of every kind that she may need and may 
herself desire." 7. Evacuation and restoration of Belgium. 
8. Reparation for devastation in France, and return of Alsace- 
Lorraine. 9. "Readjustment of the frontiers of Italy . . . 
along clearly recognizable lines of nationality.'" 10. Peoples of the 
Austrian Empire to be accorded an opportunity for autonomous 
development (a provision that was to be outrun in a few months 
by the course of the war). 11. Serbia to be given a free and 
secure access to the sea ; and the relations of the Balkan states 
to be " determined by friendly council along clearly recognizable 
lines oj allegiance and nationality ." 12. Subject nationalities 
of the Turkish empire assured of " autonomous development." 

13. A free Poland (with access to the sea), " to include the 
territories inhabited by indispiitably Polish populations." 

14. A " general association of nations " under specific covenants. 
The significance of the Fourteen Points lay even more in their 

spirit than in these detailed provisions. "We have no jealousy 
of German gTeatness," concluded this great utterance, ''and there 
is nothing in this program that impairs it. We do not wish to 
injure her or to block in any way her legitimate influence or power. 
We do not wish to fight her either with arms or unth hostile 
arrangements of trade if she is willing to associate herself with us 
and the other peace-loving nations of the world in covenants of 
justice and law and fair dealing." 

And now Germany herself made plain how absolutely right 
the Allies were in their contention that the Hohenzollerns 
could be trusted to keep no promises. March 3, 1918, the 
German militarists, with the grossest of bad faith, shame- 
lessly broke their many pledges to the helpless Bolsheviki 
and forced upon Russia the "Peace of Brest-Litovsk." By 
that dictated treaty, Germany virtually became overlord 
to a broad belt of vassal states taken from Russia — Finland, 
the Baltic Provinces, Lithuania, Poland, Ukrainia — ■ and 
even the remaining "Great Russia" had to agree to German 
control of her industrial reorganization. When the German 
perfidy had revealed itself suddenly, after long and deceitful 
negotiations, the angered and betrayed Bolsheviki wished to 



THE LAST GERMAN DRIVE 



725 



break off, and renew the war. They were absolutely helpless, 
however, without prompt Alhed aid upon a large scale. This 
aid they asked for, but urgent cablegrams brought no answer. 
The Allies apparently had been so repelled by the Bolshevist 
industrial and political policy that they were unwilling to 
deal with that government, and preferred to leave Russia 
to its fate — and to the Germans. 




The " MiTTEL-EuROPA " Empire at its greatest extent in March, 1918. In Asia, 
only a few months before, it had reached to the Persian Gulf and the Red 
Sea (cf. p. 729), but lacked then the parts of old Russia afterward acquired, 
marked here by perpendicular shadings- 

Naturally the Germans opened the campaigns in the West 
at the earliest moment possible. They had now a vast 
superiority both in men and in heavy guns there. ^^6 last 
March 21 they attacked the British lines in German 
Picardy with overwhelming forces. After five 
days of terrific fighting the British were hurled out of 
their trench lines and driven back with frightful losses 
nearly to Amiens, leaving a broad and dangerous gap 



726 AMERICA AND THE WAR 

between them and the French. But, as so often in their 
great offensives in this war, the Germans had exhausted 
themselves in their mass attack ; and, while they paused, a 
French force threw itself into the gap, and British reserves 
reinforced the shattered front lines. 

For the first time since the First Battle of the Marne, 
the Germans had forced the fighting on the West front 
into the open. In April they struck again farther north, 
in Flanders, and again they seemed almost to have over- 
whelmed the British; but, fighting desperately, "with our 
backs to the wall" as Haig phrased it in his solemn order 
to his dying army, and reinforced by some French divi- 
sions, the British kept their front unbroken, bent and 
thinned though it was. After another month of preparation, 
the Germans struck fiercely in a general attack on the French 
lines north of the Aisne, and, breaking through for the 
moment on an eighteen-mile front, once more reached the 
Marne. Here, however, they were halted, largely by Ameri- 
can troops, at Chateau-Thierry. Then, while the Americans 
made splendid counter-attacks, as at Belleau Wood (renamed, 
for them, "Wood of the Marines"), the French lines were 
reformed, so that the Allies still presented a continuous front, 
irregular though it was with dangerous salients and wedges. 
At almost the same time, Austria, forced into action again in 
Italy by German insistence, was repulsed in a general 
attack on the Piave. 

Time was fighting for the Allies. Disasters had at last 
induced them to appoint a generalissimo. This position 
was given to Ferdinand Foch, who, though then a subordi- 
nate, had been the real hero of the First Marne. For the rest 
of the struggle, the Allied forces were directed with a unity 
and skill that had been impossible under divided commands, 
even with the heartiest desire for cooperation. 

And now, too, America really had an army in France. 
Before the end of June, her effective soldiers there numbered 
1,250,000. Each month afterward brought at least 300,000 
more. By September the number exceeded two millions. 



THE ALLIED OFFENSIVE 



727 



with a million more already training in America. The 
Germans could not again take up the offensive for five 
weeks (June 11-July 15), and in this interval the xhe Amer- 
balance of available man-power turned against icans 
them. July 15, they attacked again in great force *"*'^® 
along the Marne, but this onset broke against a stone-wall 




Line of July 15 191S — --• 
" " Nov. 10 " ••••• 



German Lines on July 15 and November 10, 1918. 



resistance of French and American troops. For the first 
time in the war, a carefully prepared offensive failed to 
gain ground. 

The German failure was plain by the 17th. On the 18th, 



728 AMERICA AND THE WAR 

before the Germans could withdraw or reorganize, Foch 
began his great offensive, by counter-attacking upon the 
Foch's exposed western flank of the invaders. This 

offensive move took the Germans completely by surprise. 
Their front all but collapsed along a critical line of 
twenty-eight miles. Foch allowed them no hour of rest. 
Unlike his opponents, he did not attempt gigantic attacks, 
to break through at some one point. Instead, he kept 
up a continuous offensive, threatening every part of the 
enemy's front, but striking now here, now there, on one 
exposed flank and then on another, always ready at a 
moment to take advantage of a new opening, and giving the 
Germans no chance to withdraw their forces without 
imperiling key positions. Before the end of August the 
Allies had won back all the ground lost in the spring. 
The Germans had made their last throw — and lost. 
Foch's pressure never relaxed. In September American 
divisions began an offensive on a third part of the front, 
culminating in a drive toward Sedan, to cut one of the two 
main railways that supplied the German front, and at the 
same time the British were wrenching great sections of the 
"Hindenburg Line" from the foe. In the opening days of 
October the German commanders reported to Berlin that the 
war was lost. 

This result was determined largely by events in the East. 
In September, the Allied force, so long held inactive at 
Victories Saloniki, suddenly took the offensive, crushing 
in the East ^}^p Bulgarians in a great battle on the Vardar. 
Political changes had made this move possible. In 1917, 
now that there was no Tsar to interfere, the English and 
French had deposed and banished King Constantine of 
Greece ; and Venizelos, the new head of the Greek state, 
was warmly committed to the Allied cause. Foch's pres- 
sure made it impossible for the Germans to transfer rein- 
forcements to the Bulgarians from the West. The Saloniki 
forces advanced swiftly. Tsar Ferdinand abdicated, and 
(September 30) a provisional Bulgarian government signed 



THE TEUTONIC COLLAPSE 729 

an armistice amounting to unconditional surrender — open- 
ing also the way for an attack upon Austria from the south. 

Another series of events put Turkey out of the war. 
The preceding year a small British expedition from India 
had worked its way up the Tigris to Bagdad ; and another 
from Egypt had taken Jerusalem. Now this last army had 
finally been reinforced, and in September, in a brilliant 
campaign it freed Syria from Turkish rule. October 30, 
Turkey surrendered as abjectly as Bulgaria. The Darda- 
nelles were opened, and Constantinople admitted an Allied 
garrison. 

Austria too had dissolved. After the June repulse on the 
Piave, the Austrian army was never fit for another offensive. 
At home the conglomerate state was going to Fail of 
pieces. Bohemia on one side, and Slovenes, Austna 
Croats, and Bosnians on the other, were organizing inde- 
pendent governments — with encouragement from America 
and the Allies. Then, October 24, Italy struck on the Piave. 
The Austrian army broke in rout. Austria called franti- 
cally for an armistice, and when one was granted (Novem- 
ber 4) the ancient Hapsburg Empire had vanished. The 
Emperor abdicated. Fugitive archdukes and duchesses 
crowded Swiss hotels. And each day or two saw a new 
revolutionary republic set up in some part of the former 
Hapsburg realms. 

Germany had begun to treat for surrender a month earlier, 
but held out a week longer. October 5, the German Chan- 
celor (now the liberal Prince Max of Baden who had been a 
severe critic of Germany's war policy) had asked President 
Wilson to arrange an armistice, offering to accept the Four- 
teen Points as a basis for peace. The reply made it plain that 
America and the Allies would not treat with the old despotic 
government, and that no armistice would be granted at that 
late moment which did not secure to the Allies fully the fruits 
of their military advantages in the field. Meantime the 
fighting went on, with terrific losses on both sides. The 
French and Americans, pushing north in the Argonne and 
across the Meuse, were threatening the trunk railway at 



730 AMERICA AND THE WAR 

Sedan, the only road open for German retreat except the one 
through Belgium. The British and Belgians pushed the dis- 
couraged invaders out of northern France and out of a large 
part of Belgium. The pursuit at every point was so hot that 
retreat had to be foot by foot, or in complete rout. As a last 
desperate throw, the German warlords ordered the Kiel fleet 
to sea, to engage the English navy ; but the common sailors, 
long on the verge of mutiny, broke into open revolt, while 
everywhere the Extreme Socialists — all along opposed to the 
war — were openly preparing revolution. 

Late in October the War Council of the Allies made 
known to Germany the terms upon which she could have 
Fall of an armistice preliminary to the drafting of a 

Germany peacc treaty. Germany could save her army 
from destruction, and her territory would not suffer 
hostile conquest. But she was to surrender at once 
Alsace-Lorraine, and to withdraw her troops everywhere 
across the Rhine, leaving the Allies in possession of a 
broad belt of German territory. She was to surrender 
practically all her fleet, most of her heavy artillery, her air- 
craft, and her railway engines. Likewise she was at once 
to release all prisoners, though her own were to remain in 
the hands of- the Allies. In March, Germany had treacher- 
ously and arrogantly set her foot upon the neck of prostrate 
Russia in the Brest-Litovsk treaty : November 11, she made 
this unconditional surrender to whatever further condi- 
tions the Allies might impose in the final settlement — 
though they did pledge themselves to base their terms, 
with certain reservations, upon Mr. Wilson's Fourteen Points. 

Germany had already collapsed internally. None of the 
revolutionary risings could be put down ; and November 7, 
Bavaria deposed her king and proclaimed herself a republic. 
In Berlin the Moderate Socialists seized the government. 
State after state followed, November 9, the Kaiser fled to 
Holland, whence he soon sent his formal abdication. Ger- 
man autocracy and militarism had fallen. 



CHAPTER XLV 

THE PEACE AND THE WORLD LEAGUE 

January 18, 1919, in the ancient palace of French kings at 
Versailles, where the fallen German Empire had been first 
proclaimed just forty-eight years before, the Peace Congress 
met to reconstruct the world. The government that had 
precipitated the great war had been crushed : it remained 
to see whether the world had been chastened by its suffering 
so that it would strive in earnest to remove fundamental 
causes of war. There was a chance such as had never been 
before — and there was supreme need. 

Eight out of every nine men on the globe had belonged to 
the warring governments. Fifty-nine millions had been 
under arms — nearly all the physically fit of the cost of the 
world's leading peoples. These had suffered thirty- '^^^ 
three million casualties, of which some fourteen millions ^ 
were death or worse, besides the incalculable number of 
enfeebled and vitiated constitutions. Hardly less numerous 
(though less accurately counted) were the victims of famine 
and pestilence among civilian populations. Nor does the loss 
to one generation begin to tell the story. In all the warring 
countries the birth rate has declined alarmingly, and the 
human quality has deteriorated. A vast part of the 
world's choicest youth were cut down before marriage, 
while the civilian deaths and enfeeblement were very largely 
among child-bearing mothers and young children. As to 
material wealth, a huge portion of all that the world had 
been slowly storing up for generations was gone, and over 
wide areas all machinery for producing wealth was in ruins, 

' Nearly eight million deaths, and more than six million cases of irremediable 
mutilation and physical ruin. 

731 



732 THE PEACE CONGRESS OF 1919 

while future generations were mortgaged to pay the war 
debt. The moral losses were beyond words — sickening to 
the imagination, and war enthusiasm was replaced by pro- 
found discouragement or cynicism. 

Politically alone the situation was grave indeed. All 
Central Europe, broken in fragments, was tossing on wave 
after wave of revolution. 

1. In Germany, extreme Socialists of the Bolshevist type 
had seized control in many districts — as in Berlin and 

Munich — until finally overthrown, in the bloodiest 
of street fighting, by momentary union of all other 
classes from Junker to Moderate Socialist. In the first quiet 
interval, it is true, a National Assembly had been elected ; 
and, while waiting for the Allies to dictate terms of peace, that 
body drew up a constitution, which, quickly ratified by a 
universal franchise vote, turned the old Empire into a 
democratic federal republic — imperiled, to be sure, by 
incessant plots from both reactionaries and radical ex- 
tremists. 

2. In the former Austrian Empire a like chaos was 
intensified by the dissolution of even the old territorial 
„, ,, arrangements. The German district, iust about 

The old TT- 1 1 1 1 T 1 • 1 

Austrian Vienna, had become a republic; but its natural 
Empire dis- g^j^^j proper dcsire to join itself to Germany was 
forbidden by the Allies because they were un- 
willing that Germany should be so strengthened. Accord- 
ingly the seven million people crowded into this little 
region — "a capital without a country" and a people 
without ports or mines or any other industrial resources 
— dragged out the next years in famine relieved only by 
meager charity. 

Hungary, stripped of all its non-Magyar districts, had 
also become a little inland republic, and its nine million 
disarmed and starving people were ravaged for months by 
revengeful Roumanian invaders. Farther north, an en- 
larged and free Bohemia (the Czecho-Slovak Republic) was 
practically at war for months, not merely with Germany 



CONDITIONS IN EUROPE 733 

and Austria but also with the new Poland, over conflicting 
claims of territory. 

3. The aristocratic Polish Republic had other contests 
with Russian Bolshevists on the east and with Germany 
on the west, besides being torn by proletarian poiand. 
risings and Jewish pogroms. And Poland was New Baltic 
only one of six new states, all in like anarchy, *^*®^ 
that had split off from the old Russia on the western 
frontier alone, — Finland, Esthonia, Latvia, Lithuania, 
Ukrainia. 

4. To the south of the old Austrian realms, there had 
appeared a Jugo-Slav state, by the long-sought union of 
Serbians with former Austrian Bosnians, Cro- The jugo- 
atians, and Slovenes ; and this " Greater Serbia " ^^^^ ^*^*® 
was in battle array against Italy, in daily peril of war, over 
the Adriatic coast. Italy likewise was at daggers drawn 
with Greece over Albania, the islands of the Aegean, and the 
shores of Asia Minor. And of all these countries, new or 
old, no one felt any trust in the honor of any other. Each 
believed that every one would hold what it could lay hand 
on — and so sought to lay its own hands on as much as 
possible before the settlement. 

The Peace Congress was made up of delegations from 
the twenty-three Allied governments, with five more from 
England's colonies, — Canada, Australia, South The Peace 
Africa, India, and New Zealand. Each dele- Congress 
gation had one vote. Countries that had been neutral were 
invited to send representatives to be called in whenever 
matters arose that specially concerned them. The four 
" enemy countries " and Russia were allowed no part. 
A striking feature of the gathering was the great number 
of expert assistants present. The United States delegation 
alone was aided by more than a hundred eminent American 
authorities on the history or geography or economic re- 
sources of European lands. 

President Wilson himself headed the American dele- 
gation, in spite of vehement opposition (partly honest. 



734 THE PEACE CONGRESS OF 1919 

partly partisan) to his leaving his own country. In like 
manner, Lloyd George and Orlando, the English and Italian 
Woodrow premiers, represented their lands ; and Clemen- 
Wiisonat ceau, head of the French delegation, was natu- 
*"^ rally chosen president of the Assembly. These 

men made up the "Big Four." Part of the time this inner 
circle became the " Big Five " by the inclusion of the 
Japanese representative. 

From the first there were critical differences within the 
Big Four. Mr. Wilson had promised the world, Germany 
included, " a permanent peace based on unselfish, unbiased 
justice," and " a new international order based upon broad 
universal principles of right." To such ends he insisted, 
(1) that the first step must be the organization of a League 
of Nations, a world federation ; and (2) that all negotia- 
tions should be public — " open covenants, openly arrived 
at." 

At times, Lloyd George, too, had seemed in sympathy 
with " a peace of reconciliation " ; but he was seriously 
Lloyd hampered by the fact that in the campaign for 

Clemen-*" parliamentary elections, in December, he had 
ceau won by appeals to the worst war passions of the 

English people, throwing aside recklessly his pledges of a 
year before (page 723). The other leaders never had any 
real faith in the Wilson program. In Clemenceau's words, 
they thought President Wilson a benevolent dreamer of 
Utopias, and preferred to rest all rearrangements upon the 
old European methods of rival alliances to maintain a 
balance of power — a plan which had been tried through 
bloody centuries. 

Moreover the French statesmen looked both vengefully 
and with alarm upon Germany, which, though prostrate 
Govern- for the moment, still bordered upon them with a 
peoples^ population and resources greater than their own. 
Europe With war passions still hot, and war memories 

fresh, they wished above all things to deal with Germany 
by summary methods, to make her helpless by dismember- 
ing her and by plundering her through indemnities, and to 



AND WOODROW WILSON 735 

give to the new Poland and Bohemia enough German 
territory so that those countries might always fear attack 
by Germany, and therefore be hostile to her. With such 
states on the east, dependent upon France for safety, Ger- 
many would be held in a vise — especially if the proposed 
League of Nations could be made a cover for a guarantee 
of the arrangements by America and England.^ 

But such a program meant the perpetuation of the old 
European system of alliances, armed camps, and sooner, or 
later, of war. And by the war-weary peoples, the Mr. Wilson 
Wilson program of a just peace and a world by events at 
league was at first hailed with joy. Mr. Wilson home 
had arrived in Europe several weeks before the opening of 
the Congress, for conferences with European statesmen ; 
and everywhere in his journey — in England, France, 
Italy — he was welcomed by the working classes with 
remarkable demonstrations of respect and affection, as 
" the president of all of us," and as the apostle of world 
peace and of human brotherhood. For a time it seemed 
possible that he might, at a crisis, override the hostile 
attitude of the governments by appealing to the people 
themselves ; and indeed in a great speech at Milan — just 
after some slurring attacks upon him by French statesmen 
— he hinted pointedly at such a program. Unhappily, as 
months passed in wearisome negotiations, this fervor wasted 
away, and in each nation bitter popular animosities began 
to show toward neighboring and allied peoples. Moreover 
Mr. Wilson's power in Europe had been weakened by events 
at home. Late in the campaign for the new Congressional 
elections in the preceding November, he had made an appeal 
to the country for indorsement of his policies by a Demo- 
cratic victory. The elections gave both Houses instead to 
the Republicans; and the jubilant victors, charging venge- 
fully that the President had set an example of political 
partisanship, entered upon a bitter course of criticism and 

^ There is an admirable explanation of French feeling, an explanation tempered 
with charitable regret, in " The Malady of Europe " by Philip Gibbs, the great 
English war correspondent, in Harpers' Magazine, February, 1921. 



736 THE PEACE CONGRESS OF 1919 

obstruction — of which Mr„ Wilson's European opponents 
made the most. 

The first defeat at Paris was in the matter of secret 
negotiation. To save time, it was necessary no doubt 
Secret ne- for the Peace Congress to do most of its work in 
gotiations small committees. But it would have been 
possible to lessen bargaining and intrigue by having such 
meetings open to representatives of the press, or by publish- 
ing stenographic reports. Mr. Wilson, however, allowed 
the Old World diplomats — with their tradition of back- 
stair intrigue — to persuade him into consenting to only 
one public and general meeting each week. The result 
was that, from the first, the real work v/as done by the 
inner circle of four or five in secret conclave (with the 
addition of several advisory secret committees on special 
matters). Indeed, instead of even the promised open 
meeting once a week there were during the entire five months 
to the signing of the peace with Germany (January 18- June 
28) only six open meetings — and these merely to ratify 
conclusions arrived at by the Big Four. 

The next point Mr. Wilson won. It was agreed that the 
first business of the Congress should be to provide a League 
Agreement ^^ Nations. Many voices, especially in France 
for a League and in the United States Senate, had been raised 
ations -j^ protest, urging that a league should come only 
after a treaty of peace. Some of these objectors were 
honest : some used the objection as a means to defeat any 
real league. But Mr. Wilson argued that the league would 
expedite, not hinder, the peace treaty, since it was a necessary 
prelude to any right sort of peace. With such a guarantee 
of peace, such a league to secure disarmament and to punish- 
any bully or robber state, it was hoped that France ana 
Italy might trust to a just and merciful peace, instead of 
insisting upon vengeance and booty. 

But while a committee of fourteen nations, headed by 
Mr. Wilson, was preparing the constitution of the league, 
dark rumors crept out regarding the plans of European 
statesmen for spoils. France talked of the necessity that 



JUSTICE OR BOOTY ? 737 

she acquire all German territory west of the Rhine, her 
"natural frontier," so that in future wars that great river 
might serve as a protective ditch. Marshal Foch spoUs or 
supported this plea for military reasons ; and it de- Justice 
veloped that a secret agreement between France and Russia 
at the beginning of the war had provided for such an 
arrangement. But this would have transferred several 
millions of unwilhng Germans to French rule; and Mr. 
Wilson, as recognized spokesman for the Allies at the 
Armistice and in earlier negotiations with Germany, had 
repeatedly renounced the principle of forcible annexation 
either to punish a foe or to secure " strategic frontiers" — or 
for any purpose except to satisfy the just claims of oppressed 
nationalities. To grant this French claim would have been 
the grossest of bad faith, as well as one more continuation 
of the discredited policy of the old Congress of Vienna a 
century before. 

Italy, too, demanded, and received, not only the Italian 
populations of the Trentino, formerly held by Austria, but 
also a needless " strategic frontier" against now The Flume 
helpless Austria, involving the annexation of a incident 
purely German district in the Brenner Pass of the Alps with 
a quarter of a million inhabitants. Italy also advanced 
claims on the Adriatic at the expense of the new South 
Slav state, and it became plain that the imperfectly known 
"secret treaties," under which Italy and Japan had entered 
the war, had provided for a far-reaching division of spoils. 
Enough news leaked out from the private conclaves to make 
it certain that President Wilson denounced these projects 
and declared he would have no part in a " Congress for 
booty." At one time, indeed, when the Italian delegates 
insisted strenuously upon Croatian Fiume (the natural door 
of the South Slavs to the Adriatic), he cabled to America 
for his ship — and this particular act of plunder was avoided, 
even though Orlando did for a while leave the Congress in 
protest. But Mr. Wilson could not resort often to so 
extreme a method. Victory over Fiume was followed by 
defeat over Shantung (page 741), while the French demand 



738 THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS 

for the Rhine became a trading pretext for granting her the 
Saar Valley. At our entrance into the war, America had 
stipulated for no material gain for herself. This was well. 
But even then it was known that the AlHes had made various 
secret agreements for the division of booty. It did not occur 
to any one at the time, but future difficulties would have 
been avoided if upon entering the war America had de- 
manded the cancellation of all secret treaties as the price 
of her aid. 

In March, while other negotiations were progressing, the 
committee on the League of Nations made its report. 
The Cove- Loud Opposition was voiced at once in the United 
nant of the States Senate where Republican leaders strove 
League openly to make acceptance or rejection a party 

question ; and after a few weeks the Peace Congress revised 
the document slightly. The revised Covenant is clear and 
brief. The union is very loose, and its managing bodies 
are not really a government. " Charter membership " was 
offered to forty-five nations (including all organized govern- 
ments except Russia, the four "enemy countries," and Costa 
Rica, San Domingo, and Mexico). Amendments and 
admission of new members require the unanimous consent 
of the five big states with a majority of all states; and for 
any other action of consequence, the unanimous consent of 
all nations in the League is demanded, except that no party 
to a dispute has a voice in its settlement. Among the most 
valuable provisions of the Covenant are the prohibition 
of all secret treaties in future, and the clauses providing 
for disarmament (though only by unanimous agreement), 
for regulation of the manufacture of munitions of war, for 
compulsory arbitration, and for delay in recourse to war 
even if an arbitration is unsatisfactory. A reservation of 
the Monroe Doctrine, inserted in the second draft as a sop 
to American opposition, suggests, by its unfortunate phras- 
ing, a continuation of the pernicious doctrine of " spheres of 
influence" — pleasing to Japanese as well as to American 
Jingoes — and satisfies neither advocates nor opponents 
of the League. Much debated, too, is Article X, which 



THE PEACE WITH GERMANY 739 

guarantees to each state its territorial integrity against 
external attack. In the present form, it is feared by some, 
the Article may be an insurmountable barrier to needed 
readjustments ; while other critics object that America, 
if a member of the League, might have to send an army to 
defend European states in ill-gotten gains. 

The value of such a league must depend upon the spirit 
in which it is worked ; and, at the best, any one large state 
might block all wholesome action. Meanwhile, to The Ger- 
secure a league at all, Mr. Wilson compromised ^^^ treaty 
many of his principles in the making of the peace treaties, 
until, some of his opponents feel, those treaties themselves 
may make a beneficent working of the League very difficult. 
June 28, the treaty of peace with Germany was signed by 
the helpless German delegates, who had been summoned 
to Paris for the purpose. The treaty makes a good-sized 
book. A typical provision relates to the Saar The Saar 
Valley, a small strip of German territory just east Valley 
of Alsace. Germany cedes the rich coal mines of this region 
to France, in rightful reparation of her wanton destruction 
of French coal mines. France insisted long upon political 
sovereignty over the territory and people, along with this 
property. This claim was not directly granted ; but a " com- 
promise " places the valley for fifteen years under an Inter- 
national Commission. At the end of that time the inhabitants 
are to vote whether they will return to Germany or join France. 
If they decide for their own country, Germany ,. veiled 
must at once buy up France's claim to the coal annexa- 
mines. This may be impossible for her to do ; ^°° 
but if she fails to do it, the territory passes permanently to 
France. 

This "veiled annexation" of half a million Germans to 
a foreign power, against their will, is in sharp defiance of 
the principle of "self-determination," — and it was wholly 
unnecessary. France ought to have the coal ; but title 
to that could have been guaranteed safely without this 
transfer of political allegiance. And the Saar Valley ar- 



740 THE PEACE CONGRESS OF 1919 

rangement is merely one of several like or worse arrange- 
ments. The new Poland got not merely the Polish territory 
suesia and long held by Prussia, to which she is entitled, 
Dantzig ^3^^ ^jgQ large strips of German territory, like 
Upper Silesia (with its two million people), which she wants 
because of its mines. Moreover, in order to give Poland 
easy access to the sea, by the route of the Vistula, German 
Dantzig was made a "free" city, against its will, with added 
roundabout arrangements that leave it largely subject to 
Poland. Still further, Germany very properly not only 
returns Alsace-Lorraine to France and (with a favorable 
vote of the inhabitants) Danish Sleswig ^ to Denmark, but 
also cedes to Belgium three small pieces of territory popu- 
lated mainly by people of Belgian blood, and to Czecho- 
slovakia valuable mining districts of Silesia. Subject to 
plebiscite, she was also to cede to Poland considerable 
territory east of the Vistula, but here the vote went for 
Germany. (The fate of much of Silesia was to be de- 
cided by a plebiscite in 1921.) In all, about a fifth of old 
Germany is gone. Even this is not enough to satisfy the 
French government ; and various attempts have been 
fomented by French agents to induce the Rhine provinces 
of Germany to secede and form a separate state — after 
which it would perhaps be possible to establish French con- 
trol over them. 

Outside Europe, Germany has lost her vast colonial 
empire. But, instead of being placed under the guardian- 
The old *^^^P ^^ ^^® League of Nations until they can walk 
colonies of alone, the former German colonies are turned over 
ermany ^^ plunder to the Allies. Those in the Pacific have 
gone part to England, part to Japan, according to the terms 
of a secret treaty of 1914 between those countries. True, 
England and Japan are " mandatories " of the League of 
Nations ; but that vague arrangement is little more than 
a screen for the division of spoils — and Japan surely has 

' Sleswig was divnded, for the plebiscite, into three zones. Denmark declined 
the southern one as not Danish in blood ; the northern voted overwhelmingly for 
annexation ; the middle one voted as decisively to remain German (1920). 



IMPERIALISM VICTORIOUS 741 

shown herself (in Korea) as unfit to rule subject peoples 
as ever Germany was. German Africa, too, has been 
divided between France, Belgium, and England, with 
hardly a pretext of even the mandatory screen. 

In like manner, in the somewhat later Turkish treaties, 
the settlement was a frank surrender to arrogant imperialism, 
British and French, — France taking the long coveted parts 
of Syria, in spite of Syrian protest, and England taking Meso- 
potamia with its oil wealth. In this connection Americans 
are especially chagrined that Japan succeeds also to all 
Germany's "rights" in Shantung, with its forty The Shan- 
million people, against the futile protest of China. *""g ™*"®'' 
True, Japan has promised that her political occupation 
shall be "temporary"; but that word has been used too 
often as a prelude to permanent grabs of territory. To allow 
the one remaining despotic and military power in the world 
so to seize the door to China was not merely to betray a 
faithful ally, but also to renounce a plain and wise American 
policy in the Orient. 

More objectionable still are the economic provisions of 
the treaties. Germany was to pay fixed reparations amount- 
ing to 30 billions of dollars during the years The huge 
1920-1934 (at least twice as much as most expert ^tein-^ 
judges believe she will be able to pay) and also demnity 
other indefinite amounts, to be fixed in future by a com- 
mission of her conquerors. Other vicious economic pro- 
visions, too complicated for statement here, hamper 
Germany's industries so that she cannot begin earning any- 
thing to pay with. Critics wonder whether France igno- 
rantly overreached herself — asking so much that she will 
get far less than she might have had — or whether she 
shrewdly demanded the impossible in order to make failure 
in this an excuse for seizing permanently upon more German 
territory. (February 1, 1921, the Allied Council restated the 
indemnity — in more definite but hardly more reasonable 
terms — at 56 billion dollars, to be paid in 42 annual pay- 
ments, with an additional 12 per cent tax on all exports to 
strangle German trade.) 



742 THE PEACE CONGRESS OF 1919 

The American delegation opposed practically all these 
objectionable provisions, — and did prevent the insertion 
Criticism of of others as bad. But, on the whole, Mr. Wilson 
the treaty proved Unable to cope with the combined Old 
World diplomats. The Fourteen Points had been pledged 
as a basis for peace ; but it is difficult to trace in the treaty 
their general spirit or many of their specific provisions. Some 
of the experts attached to the American Commission resigned 
their positions in protest; and General Smuts, the hero of 
South Africa, declared in a formal statement that he signed 
the treaty for his country only because of the absolute 
necessity of immediate peace for Europe, and because he 
hoped that the worst provisions might be modified later 
by the League of Nations. Many progressive thinkers, 
the world over, believe the treaty dishonorable to the 
Allies because it contradicts solemn pledges, and bad for 
the world at large because (with the other treaties that 
followed) it leaves a hundred million people in Central 
Europe industrially enslaved and with no real hope except 
in some future war of revenge, and so breaks faith not alone 
with the beaten foe but also with the hundreds of thousands 
of splendid youth who gave their lives in torment to win 
a war that should end war. With biting sarcasm, one 
cartoon represents Clemenceau rising from the Peace table 
with the words, — " Well, first we made a war to end war, 
and now we have made a peace to end peace." 

Whether or not we judge so sternly, whether we blame 
individual statesmen or merely the common weakness of 
human nature, it is indisputable that the Peace Congress 
failed to rise to the high level of its obligation — measured 
by its opportunity. Such opportunity, unplanned, will 
not come again ; it will have to be manufactured. With 
the United States (page 756), Germany, Russia, and several 
small states still outside, the League of Nations held its first 
meeting, December-January, 1920-19'21. That gathering, 
naturally enough, proved little more than a barren conference 
of ambassadors from members of a powerful European 
alliance. Such generous tendencies as showed themselves 



AND BOLSHEVIST RUSSIA 743 

came from small states, unable in that gathering to give 
them weight; and a mild suggestion that "mandatories" 
should be administered for the common good met with 
prompt defiance by the large powers. Meantime in every 
great state, including America, chemists, engineers, military 
men, in laboratories and in councils, are seeking more 
poisonous gases, inventing bigger airships and larger guns 
and deadlier explosives, planning huger navies, while other 
scientists are prophesying even viler but highly probable 
things — as that the next war will be a contest in scattering 
hideous disease germs from aerial navies over whole con- 
tinents to destroy entire populations. And just as in 1914, 
only somewhat differently shufiled, the materials are heaped 
for a world war. Unless soon a true world federation is 
achieved, to secure disarmament and to adjust economic 
conflicts righteously, some hand will apply the torch. 

And yet a great gain lives. If the world at last find 
salvation instead of destruction, it will be largely due to 
one man's work. What had been a nebulous vision of 
fantastic dreamers, that man made the question of practical 
politics. Those critics of Woodrow Wilson who most 
sincerely mourn his " failure," know that men would not 
feel that he has failed if he had not made the goal so clear. 
The shining mark to which he turned the world's hope is not 
achieved — but it is not forgotten. 

Before we turn back to American domestic problems, one 
more European matter claims attention. For two years 
after Germany's fall, the Allies continued a mis- ^j^^ ^^gg 
taken policy toward Russia. In all Allied lands and the 
there was intense feeling against the Bolshevist 
government. This was due partly to popular ignorance 
(caused largely by a rigid censorship of Russian news by the 
Allied governments, and intensified by a frantic propaganda 
of falsehood directed by agents of the dispossessed aristo- 
crats), partly to a delusion that the Bolshevists were tools 
of Germany, and partly to real evils in the Bolshevist 
scheme. 



744 THE PEACE CONGRESS OF 1919 

After the fall of the Tsar, society in Russia collapsed. 
Criminals, singly or in bands, worked their will, unchecked 
The Boishe- ^^ ^"^ government, in robbery, outrage, and 
vists restore murder, not only in country districts but even 
order ^^ ^^^ public streets of great cities. And the 

usual criminal class was reinforced by numbers of men made 
desperate by hunger. For the cities were starving ; and 
speculators were increasing the agony by hoarding supplies 
to sell secretly to the rich at huge profits. Absurdly 
enough, our papers, especially in their cartoons, ascribed 
all this to the Bolshevists — ivho in reality put it down. 
Kerensky had proved utterly unable to grapple with the 
situation ; but when the Bolshevists came to power, they 
shot the bandits in batches, and meted out like swift 
punishment to " forestallers " of food. In such sumnlary 
proceedings, many innocent persons must have suffered 
along with the guilty ; but at least Russia was saved from 
reverting to savagery. In a few weeks, order and quiet 
were restored ; the available food was " rationed " rigidly 
(somewhat as in England during the war) with particular 
care for children of all classes ; and private crime became less 
than Russia had ever known. All this parallels the story 
of the French Revolution just after the fall of the Bastille, 
except that in Russia the task was infinitely harder and was 
performed, not by an organized middle class, but by the 
untrained Bolshevists. 

At first the new government seems to have treated the old 
capitalist class with some consideration so far as concerns 
The Red their personal safety. But a little later, when 
Terror \\^q world was attacking Russia in open war, and 

when the dispossessed Russian classes were carrying on a 
campaign of secret assassination of Bolshevist leaders (and 
had even struck down Lenin with a dangerous wound), the 
Bolshevists adopted a deliberate policy of " Terror," arrest- 
ing and executing some thousands of " aristocrats," until 
internal opposition was crushed. Again this parallels thv. 
story of the French Revolution, except that the Russian 
" Terror," bloody as it was, was shorter and less atrocious 



AND BOLSHEVIST RUSSIA 745 

than the French. Certainly the misery caused by it, even 
at its worst, was less than the misery caused in Russia 
decade after decade by the old tyranny of the Tsars — on 
which the world had looked with complacency. 

But for the first time in history the Bolshevists put into 
actual operation a system of extreme socialism on a large 
scale. Not unnaturally, this alarmed and The " dicta- 
angered the propertied classes everywhere ; and the^p'roie- 
an excuse for the world to interfere was found in tariat" 
the fact that the thing had been done, not by the Russian 
people, but by a " dictatorship of the proletariat." Control 
in Russia had been seized by the small but organized class of 
town workers. The far more numerous but unorganized 
and ignorant peasantry, fairly content with the land they 
had been allowed to appropriate, acquiesced passively ; 
and the small class of capitalists and " intellectuals " was 
tyrannically suppressed and silenced. 

The Bolshevists claimed to rest their rule on a new principle of 
citizenship. Able-bodied men and women who do no useful work 
with hand or brain they exclude from the political Denial of 
franchise as social parasites. In their list of useful ^^^^ speech 
workers they include teachers, actors, artists, physicians, engineers, 
and industrial managers, along with all hand workers ; but they 
exclude lawyers, bankers, and all who live upon invested capital. 
All recognized "workers" are organized in industrial unions, and 
representation in the government is based on these unions. 
Each such union sends its representatives to the soviet (council) 
of its local district. This local soviet sends its delegates to the 
soviet of the next larger district; and so on. All delegates are 
subject to recall at any time by the body that elected them. 
In arranging the apportionment, the rural districts are given 
a much smaller vote in proportion to population than the city 
districts. 

By this device, along with their control over the press and all 
other agencies of propaganda, the Bolshevists so far maintain 
themselves in power. One of the heaviest indictments against 
Lenin and Trotsky is that they have suppressed all public ex- 
pression of anti-socialist agitation in a way wholly incompatible 
with free government. 



746 THE PEACE CONGRESS OF 1919 

The non-socialist forces might have recovered and com- 
bined so as to overthrow or modify Bolshevism, had 
Why Rus- not the Allies by a colossal and cruel blunder 
sian patri- identified that rule with Russian patriotism, 
to the Instead of leaving the Bolshevist theory to 

Bolshevists demonstrate its failure in practice, the Allied 
governments chose to combat it by war. Like the " emi- 
grant " nobles who fled from France at the opening of her 
Revolution, so in 1917 the fugitive Russian courtiers and 
nobles levied war against the new government of their 
country — with foreign aid. Kolchak for a time held much 
of Siberia — to be succeeded there, when he had been 
crushed by the Bolshevists, by Japanese invaders ; Denikin, 
and afterward Wrangel, began invasion from the Ukraine. 
These and other such leaders claimed flimsily to wish 
" constitutional " government for Russia ; but more and more 
clearly their deeds proved a plot to restore despotism, and 
their atrocious " White Terrors " at least equaled the ex- 
cesses charged against the Bolshevists. Meantime Rou- 
mania, Poland, and the new Baltic countries made the 
cordon about Russia complete except for Archangel on the 
north — and that one opening to the world was long held 
by an army of 12,000 Allies and Americans. 

These troops had been sent to Archangel during the last of 
the war against Germany to protect military stores there from 
America at German seizure ; but soon these soldiers who had 
war with enlisted to fight the Kaiser were used, at the be- 
"^^^* hest of French and English rulers, as an invading 

army against the new government of Russia — a service 
extremely hateful to great numbers of them. The world 
was told that the Russian people, freed and encouraged by 
the presence of such ttoops, would rally to overthrow 
Bolshevist tyranny. But the Russian people rallied in- 
stead to the Bolshevists, and the few who at first fought 
along with the Allies deserted rapidly to their countrymen. 
A curious feature of the business is that democratic America 
found itself at war with Russia for nearly two years without 
action by Congress. 



AND BOLSHEVIST RUSSIA 747 

The " blockade " of Russia has virtually continued to 
1921. The small Baltic states, from which she soon won 
peace, had no resources for trade; and though ^j^^ 
England and America had technically lifted the Russian 
blockade some months earlier, both continued to ''Cockade" 
refuse passports and even mail and wire communication 
with Russia. This of course absolutely prevented trade. 
Meantime the lack of food and of medical supplies — which 
the Bolshevist government was eager to pay for in gold — 
has slain more people (mainly mothers, young babies', and 
hospital cases) than a great war. The blockade, too, 
has kept Russia from getting cotton or rubber for her 
factories, or locomotives for her railroads, or machinery 
for her agriculture; and so it has given the Bolshevists a 
plausible excuse for the slowness of their industrial revival. 
(The same blockade, like the destruction of the German 
market, has been a factor in closing down American in- 
dustries and in throwing American workmen out of jobs.) 



CHAPTER XLVI 

THE NEW AGE 

The United States entered the war late, and our borders 
were remote from the struggle. We made relatively small 
America's Sacrifice. Still eighty thousand American boys 
war loss \[q {^i French soil, and as many more were irrep- 
arably maimed. As to money, aside from huge sums 
raised by war taxes, our debt is twenty-five billions, with- 
out counting the ten billions that our government bor- 
rowed from our people to lend to England, France, and 
Italy. On these loans the Allied countries will perhaps pay 
the interest (though up to the close of 1920 no payment 
has been made) and sometime possibly they will repay the 
principal ; but on only the remaining twenty -five billions 
the interest will each year exceed the total yearly expend- 
iture of the government before the war. This debt is 
ten times that with which we came out of the Civil War, 
and it equals all the receipts of the Treasury from George 
Washington to Woodrow Wilson. Without paying a cent 
of the principal we shall have to tax ourselves for our national 
government at least twice as much as ever before. 

But we must also pay the principal. If we do so in one 
generation (as probably we shall), that will mean one billion 
more of taxes a year. As the principal is paid, the interest 
will lessen; but, taking into account the increased cost of 
living for the government, it is safe to say that for the next 
twenty-five years we must raise at least three billion dollars a 
year, or three fourths as much as in the war years themselves.^ 

' In Europe the burden is terrifying. The huge totals of indebtedness in France 
and Germany have little meaning to us. England has suffered less than the con- 
tinent, but England's debt is enormous. Merely to keep up the interest, along with 

748 



ORGANIZED EFFORT 749 

(For 1920 the expenditure has been nearly twice that im- 
mense sum.) 

Still there is another side. No war was ever so hideously 
destructive, but neither did any other ever give birth to so 
many healing and constructive forces. It is worth Healing 
while to survey these with view to their utilization forces 
in peace. To our surprise and to that of the world, America 
proved that a great democracy, utterly unready for war, 
could organize for war eflSciently and swiftly. The task was 
not merely to select and train three million soldiers, but to 
mobilize one hundred million people for team work so as 
to utilize every resource, with harmony and intelligence, in 
producing and transporting supplies and supplying funds. 
The government provided inspiration and guidance through 
eminent experts in all lines — historians, chemists, engineers, 
heads of great business enterprises — organized in a variety 
of war boards. 

The Committee on Public Information created by Presi- 
dent Wilson was a new thing in history. If a democracy 
was to turn from all its ordinary ways of living The war 
in order to fight zealously, it must be posted boards 
thoroughly on the danger that threatened it and on the 
needs of the country. Within a few months, at small ex- 
pense, this Committee published and circulated in every 
village in America more than a hundred different pam- 
phlets, brief, readable, forceful, written by leading American 
scholars and distributed literally by the million. Along 
with posters and placards, designed by America's foremost 
illustrators and distributed also by this Committee, these 
publications did a marvelous work in spreading informa- 
tion and arousing will power - — demonstrating that in war 
itself the pen is mightier than the sword. The same 
Committee originated also the admirable organization of 
Four-Minute Men (some 5000 volunteer speakers to ex- 
plain the causes and needs of the war in their respective 
communities to audiences gathered at the movies and 

her old annual expenditure, she must raise five billions of dollars a year, which 
means per family a burden five times that of the average American family. 



750 THE NEW AGE 

other entertainments) ; and it made the plan effective by 
sending to all the local centers at frequent intervals in- 
formation and suggestions for speeches. 

This was one of many boards of which only a few may be 
mentioned here. A Shipping Board was soon building 
ships on a scale and with rapidity beyond all precedent — 
not without some blunders and much extravagance/ but 
fast enough to beat the submarine. The War Labor Board 
maintained the necessary harmony between capital and 
labor in war industries, and also did much to advance 
permanently the condition of the workers by encouraging 
"shop committees" to share in the management of industry. 
(Ex-President Taft served as one of the joint chairmen of 
this body, and his judicial temper and legal skill made his 
services invaluable. He won, too, lasting gratitude from 
labor by his sympathetic understanding of its needs.) The 
Food Commission, headed by Herbert Hoover, induced the 
American people cheerfully to limit consumption and to 
"save the waste." In 1917 a poor crop had given us, by 
the usual computation, only 20 million bushels of- wheat 
for export ; but by doing without and by using substitutes, 
we did export 141 million bushels — or about as much for 
each man, woman, and child, in England, France, and 
Italy, as we kept for each one at home. In like manner, 
a National Economy Board induced manufacturers of cloth- 
Saving for ^^S to put forth fewer and simpler styles, saving 
the public at least a fifth of the usual materials. The mines 
^°° would have proved wholly unable to meet the war 

demand for coal except for the regulation of its use through 
a Fuel Administrator. People learned to heat offices and 
homes only to 65° instead of to 72° ; and in 1918 for many 
weeks, at government request, churches were closed, and 
stores and other industries shut down on certain days of 
the week. A little later, to save the petrol needed for auto- 
trucks and airplanes in France, "gasless" Sunday took its 

^ Disclosures, incomplete at this writing, indicate that this Board, through 
incompetent or corrupt subordinates, has been sadly victimized by profiteers in 
the purchase of supplies. 



ORGANIZED EFFORT 751 

place alongside the earlier "wheatless," "meatless," and 
"heatless" days of each week. 

Along with saving went work to increase production. 
Farmers extended their acreage for needed crops, securing 
the necessary advances for seed and machinery from local 
or State agencies; and the lack of farm labor was supplied 
in part by volunteer schoolboys and, especially on fruit 
farms, by college girls. A huge food supply, too, was 
produced in cities on ""war gardens," from grounds formerly 
devoted to beauty or pleasure. Other volunteer activities 
supplemented the work of the National Boards — the 
unpaid Examining Boards of busy physicians to secure 
physical fitness for the recruits ; the volunteer village school- 
teachers working nights and Sundays to classify results 
from the draft questionnaires ; the Red Cross organizations 
reaching down to every rural schoolhouse. 

In all the activities, women had a leading part ; and 
indeed behind each man who took up a rifle stood a woman 
to take up the task he had laid down. In England, as her 
men were drained off, five million women did men's work ; 
and even in America women ran motor buses, street cars, 
and elevators, and were largely employed in munition 
factories. 

The United States formed no alliance with England or 
France or Italy, but it recognized that they and we were 
"associated" as co-workers and that we must give Taxes and 
them all possible aid. The part of the American ^°^^^ 
soldier has been treated. Money, too, we loaned freely — 
most of it, to be sure, used at once by the Allies in buying 
supplies in America, The direct taxes raised during the 
war (some four billions a year) came at least half from a 
graduated income tax bearing heavily on large incomes, in- 
heritance taxes of like character, "excess profits" taxes, and 
"luxury" taxes. The remaining money for all this war ex- 
penditure, our government borrowed from our own people, 
mainly in a series of "Liberty bond" issues. The bonds 
were sold in small denominations, down to fifty dollars, 
and were taken very largely by people of small means — 



752 THE NEW AGE 

at a time, too, when much more profitable investments 
were open. 

This glorious record was not written so hurriedly without 
some grievous blots. In the heat of war passion, gross 
Blots on injustices were committed now and then by honest 
the record patriots, and some foolish offenders were punished 
too severely. Mob violence was permitted, even encouraged, 
by some local authorities. The methods by which poor men 
in many places were coerced into taking more bonds than 
they could afford did not well suit the name Liberty for 
those bonds. Here and there designing politicians or self- 
ish business interests sought to discredit radical reform 
movements by accusing the leaders falsely of "pro-Ger- 
manism" — a desecration of patriotism to cover sinister 
ambitions that was more hurtful to our war efficiency than 
all the pro-German plots in America. 

Basest of all, and most dangerous to American success, 
were the financial scandals. To prevent the European 
The demand for our products from raising prices 

profiteers ruinously, and to check speculation in foodstuffs, 
the Food Commission took some important steps in fixing 
prices and regulating profits. But the process did not go 
far enough. The price of wheat and of wheat flour was fixed ; 
but speculators traded upon the patriotic willingness of the 
people to use less needed substitutes (as the government re- 
quested), like rye flour and oat meal, by raising exorbitantly 
the prices of these flours. During a great coal strike, in 
1919, Mr. McAdoo, ex-Secretary of the Treasury, startled 
the country by announcing that the coal mine owners, ac- 
cording to their own income tax reports to the government, 
had made immense profits the preceding year, many of them 
over 100 per cent on their entire capital stock (which in- 
cluded vast amounts of "water") and some of them 2000 
per cent — at a time too when their workmen at the request 
of a government board were toiling patriotically for a lower 
"real wage" than before the war. And Mr. Basil M. 
Manly, one of the joint chairmen of the War Labor Board. 



THE ORGY OF PROFITEERING 



753 



has since published figures and facts to show that Mr. 
McAdoo's statement was far too moderate. Quite as out- 
rageous was the i)rofiteering of the meat packers and the 
steel mills, just when every good citizen was stinting his 
life so as to buy Liberty bonds — the proceeds from which 
were being used by the government to purchase the 
exorbitantly priced goods out of which these companies 
were making their vile profits. Vast "war fortunes," too. 




American Airplanes in Military Formation over an aviation fit4d in Texas- 
At our entrance into the war our papers boasted that some of our planes would 
" blind the German giant-"' But despite the expenditure of a billion dollars in 
the enterprise, we failed, during the remaining year and a half of war, to place 
fighting planes of our manufacture on the front- Reputable engineers have 
made charges — as yet uninvestigated — that the failure was due to graft as 
well as to mismanagement- 
were made in munitions and in many other lines, and, by 
common computation, some seventeen thousand " war 
millionaires" sprang up. Nor has the government proved 
resolute enough to punish one biff profiteer. 

During the struggle we boasted loudly that this war was 
being paid for by the rich, not by the workers. It might 
have been paid for so, if we had "conscripted" the wealth 
of these war profiteers as zealously as we conscripted the 
life of our splendid youth for the battle field. As things 



754 THE NEW AGE 

are, we justify our boasts very imperfectly by pointing to our 
system of war taxes. So far we have hardly begun to pay 
the cost. If we make good our pledge, we must continue 
for a generation to raise most of our national revenue on the 
same system, or on one that will more effectively reach the 
war fortunes. But hardly had a new Congress been elected 
in November of 1920, when a drive of big interests began 
trying to persuade it to repeal the existing taxes on wealth. 

This is perhaps the least important of many signs of reac- 
tion since the war. The heaviest cost of war is the spiritual 
The cost. Before the struggle closed, the whole people 

promise seemed to have won a vision of a new and better 
world. We thought we had learned that when a rich family 
saved its fragments for a later meal, some starving child 
elsewhere could be fed : that is, we had learned to save, we 
thought, not for our own pockets alone, but for the general 
good. We had learned to do our daily work not merely for 
private gain, but, more, for the well being of our country. 
We saw clearly that every man who fails to do work useful to 
society is a parasite, whether tramp or millionaire. We saw 
that by cooperation, in place of wasteful and outgrown 
competition, we could increase enormously the productive- 
ness of our labor, and that by wise direction useful work 
could be found for every willing hand and brain. We saw 
thousands of cases of inefficiency and of wasted lives, due 
to defective eyes or teeth or feet, cured at public expense 
to augment our fighting efficiency, and we began to see 
that like methods might tremendously augment industrial 
efficiency in peace, besides making multitudes of lives 
happier and better. And surely, we thought, when we 
have won this war, the world will free itself from the crush- 
ing cost of vast military establishments with their fatal 
temptations to new wars. 

Lessons like these, it seemed, after being so burned into 
our lives through the war years, must leave lasting impress. 
But at the end the world was wearied in spirit as in body. 
There followed a general slump in morale, and the field was 



SPIRITUAL LOSSES 755 

abandoned for a time (as in all other large countries) to 
riotous profiteering and shameless self-indulgence. The war 
mind, with its retrogressive instincts, impelled us And disap- 
to rely on cave-man methods rather than social poi^tment 
means to reach our ends. In labor disputes, both parties 
show a disposition to violence. Labor has attempted general 
strikes, when the ballot was the proper means of reform; 
and reactionary heads of capitalistic associations, organized 
nation-wide against even the old unionism (under color of an 
" open shop " crusade) and talking openly of using machine 
guns, seek to create State constabularies to break strikes, 
Cossack fashion, and, by unscrupulous and costly but emi- 
nently effective propaganda, strive to confuse all liberalism 
with " Bolshevism." ^ Even the Department of Justice, in a 
ludicrous panic over a handful of revolutionary agitators, 
stains the fair fame of America as a land of freedom, and 
multiplies radical discontent as no other factor has been able 
to do, by denying plain Constitutional rights to American 
citizens and by extending a vicious spy system to include 
even the agent provocateur.' Small wonder that Charles 
Evans Hughes has declared his fear that the Constitution 
could not survive another great war. 

Such facts are especially painful, when one recalls the liberal 
I tendencies of the Wilson administration in the years 1913- 
1916. By 1918, that administration had executed The ad- 
an amazing right-about. It is too early to under- ministration 
stand the causes adequately ; but the fact remains that the 
President's old ?^nofficial progressive advisers were discarded, 
and that within the Cabinet some liberals (like Secretary 
McAdoo of the Treasury, long the strongest spirit there) 
had withdrawn, while Conservatives like Secretaries Palmer 
and Burleson, formerly quaint figures in a liberal Cabinet, 

* See especially the unimpeachable evidence of Interchiirch Movement's Report 
on the Steel Strike of 1919. The temperate but conclusive proof there of the pros- 
titution of the "public" press to serve despotic purposes of big business touches 
the deadliest danger in American life. 

^ Evidence is contained in a detailed statement signed by legal authorities of 
high standing and entitled Illegal Practises of the Department of Justice (published 
at Washington by the National Popular Government League). 



756 THE NEW AGE 

had become the dominant forces in it. In some degree, all 
this may have been connected with a disastrous accident 
yet to be mentioned. 

Mr. Wilson's return from the Peace Congress was followed 
by a two-year's debate in Senate and country upon the 
The League League of Nations. The President insisted vigor- 
of Nations ously upon ratification of the Covenant without 
any essential modification. Party discipline brought him the 
support of all but one or two Democratic senators, but at no 
time did he have any prospect of the necessary two-thirds 
vote. All attempts of certain Republican senators to amend 
the Covenant radically failed also. A small body of " ir- 
reconcilables " declared against any League, arguing with 
short-sighted selfishness that America was well off and could 
let the rest of the world look out for itself ; but finally 
a small majority, including most of the Republican senators, 
added to the Covenant certain reservations as to our in- 
terpretation of our obligations under it. Against the 
President's opposition, however, the necessary two-thirds 
vote to ratify in this form could not be secured. In the 
midst of this deadlocked struggle, while on a campaign 
tour to arouse popular support for the League, the over- 
burdened President suffered a distressing physical collapse, 
which for many months wholly incapacitated him for public 
business. 

Meantime the country entered the political campaign of 
1920. The Republican Convention at Chicago turned down 
Election the progressive element represented there, and, 
of 1920 with equal decision, the Democratic Convention 
at San Francisco turned down McAdoo and rejected every 
part of the progressive program that was urged. Both 
platforms contained vague progressive promises; but these 
were merely the usual tactical maneuvers. The machinery 
of both parties, it was plain, was controlled overwhelmingly 
by reactionary elements. 

Ofiicially both parties declared the League the main 
issue. But the people were confused by the Republican 
candidate's conflicting attempts to conciliate both Moderate 



THE NEW AGE 757 

Reservationists and Irreconcilables within his party, and, 
except for a small class of intellectuals, they had mainly 
lost interest in that question anyway. They were much 
more concerned at the unbridled orgy of profiteering and 
the perilous increase in the cost of living ; and progressive 
elements were deeply offended by recent reactionary policies. 
There was, to be sure, no assurance whatever of betterment 
in either matter from a change of parties, but the people 
were minded at least to punish the party just then most 
directly responsible; and the result was a landslide Re- 
publican victory, with the election of Warren G. Harding. 

Our story closes in a period of stress. America is not 
wholly free from danger that frantic reaction may bury 
progress beyond resurrection, or that ignorant revolution 
may destroy the possibility of wholesome progress. But 
men of faith will work that our children may yet achieve 
the promised land whereof we caught gleaming visions 
through the war wrack — a world " safe for democracy " 
and " fit for heroes." If civilization is to be saved from world- 
wide collapse, there must be built a new world order, based 
not on international rivalry but on human fraternity and 
solidarity ; and, just 'as surely, within each nation must we 
build a new social order based not upon competition and 
class struggles but upon brotherhood, — on a planned and 
democratic cooperation in industry for the common good. 

Not at a leap may we reach such a goal. But the man 
to serve the world is he who sets his face resolutely toward 
the goal and withholds all aid to measures that make it 
more difficult to attain. The story of America's past is 
worth while so far as it points us to a nobler America of the 
future — so far as it gives us robust faith that the nation 
which rallied so splendidly to save our country and the world 
in war time will not long fail in time of peace. 



Unexpected delays in publication make it possible to add 
a paragraph of optimism for the future. The early work 



758 THE NEW AGE 

of the Disarmament Conference at Washington in the au- 
tumn of 1921 gives evidence that the hope of progress ex- 
pressed above is on the way toward reaHzation. 



APPENDIX 

THE FEDERAL CONSTITUTION 

(Recommended by the Philadelphia Convention to the States, Septem- 
ber 17, 1787; ratified by the ninth State, June 21, 1788; in effect, April 
30, 1789. The text is that printed in the Revised Statutes (1878), except 
for (1) the footnote references, and (2) the brackets used in a few instances 
to inclose portions of the document no longer effective. Interpolated 
matter, in the same type as this paragraph, is placed within marks of paren- 
thesis.) 

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, 
establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common 
defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty 
to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this CONSTITUTION 
for the United States of America. 

ARTICLE I 

Section i. All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a 
Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of 
Representatives. 

Section 2. The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members 
chosen every second Year by the People of the several States, and the Electors 
in each State shall have the Qualifications requisite for Electors of the most 
numerous Branch of the State Legislature. 

No Person shall be a Representative who shall not have attained to the 
Age of twenty five Years, and been seven Years a Citizen of the United Statss, 
and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State in which he 
shall be chosen. 

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several 
States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective 
numbers [which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free 
Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years], and excluding 
Indians not taxed, [three fifths of all other Persons]. The actual Enumera- 
tion shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of 
the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such 
Manner as they shall by Law direct. ^ The nimiber of Representatives shall 
not exceed one for every thirty Thousand,^ but each State shall have at Least 
one Representative. 

1 The first census was taken in 1790, and one has been taken in the closing 
year of each decade since. 

^ The First Congress made the number 33,000. It is now (1920) 193,284. 

1 



2 APPENDIX 

When vacancies happen in the Representation from any State, the Executive 
Authority thereof shall issue Writs of Election to fill such Vacancies. 

The House of Representatives shall chuse their Speaker and other Officers ; 
and shall have the sole Power of Impeachment. 

Section 3. The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two 
Senators from each State, chosen [by the Legislature thereof,] for six Years ; 
and each Senator shall have one Vote. 

[Immediately after they shall be assembled in Consequence of the first 
Election, they shall be divided as equally as may be into three Classes. The 
Seats of the Senators of the first Class shall be vacated at the Expiration of the 
second Year, of the second Class at the Expiration of the fourth Year, and of 
the third Class at the Expiration of the sixth Year], so that one third may be 
chosen every second Year; [and if Vacancies happen by Resignation, or 
otherwise, during the Recess of the Legislature of any State, the Executive 
thereof may make temporary Appointments until the next Meeting of the 
Legislature, which shall then fill such Vacancies.] '■ 

No Person shall be a Senator who shall not have attained to the Age of 
thirty Years, and been nine Years a Citizen of the United States, and who 
shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State for which he shall be 
chosen. 

The Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, 
but shall have no Vote, unless they be equally divided. 

The Senate shall chuse their other Officers, and also a President pro 
tempore, in the Absence of the Vice President, or when he shall exercise 
the Office of the President of the United States 

The Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments. When 
sitting for that Purpose, they shall be on Oath or Affirmation. When the 
President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside : And 
no Person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two thirds of the 
Members present. 

Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to re- 
moval from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, 
Trust, or Profit under the United States: but the Party convicted shall 
nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment, and 
Punishment, according to Law. 

Section 4. The Times, Places, and Manner of holding Elections for 
Senators and Representatives shall be prescribed in each State by the Legis- 
lature thereof ; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such 
Regulations [except as to the Places of chusing senators]. 

The Congress shall assemble at least once in every Year, and such Meeting 
shall be on the first Monday in December, unless tihey shall by Law appoint 
a different Day. 

Section 5. Each House shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns, 
and Qualifications of its own Members, and a Majority of each shall constitute 
a Quorum to do Business ; but a smaller number may adjourn from day to 
day, and may be authorized to compel the Attendance of absent Members, 
in such Manner, and under such Penalties as each House may provide. 

Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings, punish its Mem- 

^ See Seventeenth Amendment. 



THE FEDERAL CONSTITUTION 3 

bers for disorderly Behaviour, and, with the Concurrence of two thirds, 
expel a member. 

Each House shall keep a Journal of its Proceedings, and from time to time 
publish the same, excepting such Parts as may in their Judgment require 
Secrecy; and the Yeas and Nays of the Members of either House on any 
question shall, at the Desire of one fifth of those Present, be entered on the 
Journal. 

Neither House, during the Session of Congress, shall, without the Consent 
of the other, adjourn for more than three days, nor to any other Place than that 
in which the two Houses shall be sitting. 

Section 6. The Senators and Representatives shall receive a Compensa- 
tion for their Services, to be ascertained by Law, and paid out of the Treasury 
of the United States. They shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony, and 
Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their Attendance at 
the Session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the 
same ; and for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be ques- 
tioned in any other Place. 

No Senator or Representative shall, during the Time for which he was 
elected, be appointed to any civil Office under the Authority of the United 
States, which shall have been created, or the Emoluments whereof shall have 
been encreased during such time ; and no Person holding any Office tmder the 
United States, shall be a Member of either House during his Continuance in 
Office. 

Section 7. All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of 
Representatives ; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as 
on other Bills. 

Every Bill which shall have passed the House of Representatives and the 
Senate, shall, before it become a Law, be presented to the President of the 
United States ; If he approve he shall sign it, but if not he shall return it, 
with his Objections, to that House in which it shall have originated, who 
shall enter the Objections at large on their Journal, and proceed to recon- 
sider it. If after such Reconsideration two thirds of that House shall agree 
to pass the Bill, it shall be sent, together with the Objections, to the other 
House, by which it shall likewise be reconsidered, and if approved by two 
thirds of that House, it shall become a Law. But in all such Cases the 
Votes of both Houses shall be determined by Yeas and Nays, and the 
Names of the Persons voting for and against the Bill shall be entered on 
the Journal of each House respectively. If any Bill shall not be returned 
by the President within ten Days (Sundays excepted) after it shall have 
been presented to him, the Same shall be a law, in like Manner as if he 
had signed it, unless Congress by their Adjournment prevent its Return, in 
which Case it shall not be a Law.^ 

1 The veto provision in the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 ran : — 
"Article IL No bill or resolve of the senate or house of representatives shall 
become a law, and have force as such, until it shall have been laid before the governor 
for his revisal ; and if he, upon such revision, approve thereof, he shall signify his 
approbation by signing the same. But if he have any objection to the passing of 
such bill or resolve, he shall return the same, together with his objections thereto, 
in writing, to the senate or house of representatives, in whatsoever the same shall 
have originated, who shall enter the objections sent down by the governor, at large. 



4 APPENDIX 

Every Order, Resolution, or Vote to which the Concurrence of the Senate 
and House of Representatives may be necessary (except on a question of 
Adjournment) shall be presented to the President of the United States ; 
and before the Same shall take Effect, shall be approved by him, or being 
disapproved by him, shall be repassed by two thirds of the Senate and House 
of Representatives, according to the Rules and Limitations prescribed in the 
Case of a Bill. 

Section 8. The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, 
Duties, Imposts, and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common 
Defence and general Welfare of the United States ; but all Duties, Imposts 
and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States ; 

To borrow Money on the Credit of the United States ; 

To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, 
and with the Indian Tribes; 

To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization, and imiform Laws on the 
subject of Bankruptcies throughout the United States ; 

To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix 
the Standard of Weights and Measures ; 

To provide for the Punishment of counterfeiting the Securities and current 
Coin of the United States ; . 

To establish Post Offices and post Roads ; 

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited 
Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings 
and Discoveries ; 

To constitute Tribunals inferior to the supreme Court; 

To define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, 
and Offences against the Law of Nations ; 

To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules 
concerning Captures on Land and Water; 

To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use 
shall be for a longer Term than two Years; 

To provide and maintain a Navy; 

To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval 
Forces ; 

To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, 
suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions ; 

on their records, and proceed to reconsider the said bill or resolve ; but if after such 
reconsideration, two thirds of the said senate or house of representatives shall, not- 
withstanding the objections, agree to pass the same, it shall, together with the 
objections, be sent to the other branch of the legislature, where it shall also be 
reconsidered, and if approved by two thirds of the members present, shall have the 
force of law ; but in all such cases, the vote of both houses shall be determined 
by yeas and nays ; and the names of the persons voting for or against the said bill 
or resolve shall be entered upon the public records of the Commonwealth. 

"And in order to prevent unnecessary delays, if any bill or resolve shall not 
be returned by the governor within five days after it shall have been presented, the 
same shall have the force of law." 

The " pocket-veto " clause (the last provision of the text above) was origi- 
nal in the Federal Constitution. 



THE FEDERAL CONSTITUTION 5 

To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for 
governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United 
States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, 
and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed 
by Congress : 

To exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such Dis- 
trict (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, by Cession of particular States, 
and the Acceptance of Congress, become the Seat of the Government of the 
United States, and to exercise like Authority over all Places purchased by the 
Consent of the Legislature of the State in which the same shall be, for the 
Erection of Forts, Magazines, Arsenals, dock- Yards, and other needful Build- 
ings ; — And 

To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into 
Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Con- 
stitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or 
Officer thereof. 

Section 9. [The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the 
States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the 
Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight himdred and eight, but a 
Tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten dollars 
for each Person.) 

The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, xmless 
when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it. 

No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed. 

No Capitation, or other direct,^ Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to 
the Census or Enumeration herein before directed to be taken. 

No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State. 

No Preference shall be given by any Regulation of Commerce or Revenue 
to the Ports of one State over those of another: nor shall Vessels bound to, 
or from, one State, be obliged to enter, clear, or pay Duties in another. 

No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of 
Appropriations made by Laws ; and a regular Statement and Account of the 
Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time 
to time. 

No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States : And no Person 
holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent 
of the Congress, accept of any present. Emolument, Office, or Title, of any 
kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State. 

Section 10. No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confeder- 
ation ; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal ; coin Money ; emit Bills of 
Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of 
Debts; pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law inpairing the 
Obligation of Contracts, or grant any Title of Nobility. 

No State shall, without the Consent of the Congress, lay any Imposts or 
Duties on Imports or Exports, except what may be absolutely necessary for 
executing its inspection Laws : and the net Produce of all Duties and Imposts, 
laid by any State on Imports or Exports, shall be for the Use of the Treasury 
of the United States ; and all such Laws shall be subject to the Revision and 
Controul of the Congress. 

' Modified by the Sixteenth Amendment. 



6 APPENDIX 

No State shall, without the consent of Congress, lay any Duty of Tonnage, 
keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace, enter into any Agreement or 
Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power, or engage in War, un- 
less actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay 

ARTICLE II 

Section i. The executive Power shall be vested in a President of tht 
United States of America. He shall hold his Office during the Term of four 
Years and, together with the Vice President, chosen for the same Term, be 
elected, as follows 

Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may 
direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole number of Senators and 
Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress : but no 
Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit 
under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector. 

[The Electors shall meet in their respective States, and vote by Ballot for 
two Persons, of whom one at least shall not be an Inhabitant of the same 
State with themselves. And they shall make a List of all the Persons voted 
for, and of the Number of Votes for each; which List they shall sign and 
certify, and transmit sealed to the Seat of the Government of the United 
States, directed to the President of the Senate. The President of the Senate 
shall, in the Presence of the Senate and House of Representative, open all 
the Certificates, and the Votes shall then be counted. The Person having the 
greatest number of Votes shall be the President, if such nimiber be a Majority 
of the whole number of Electors appointed ; and if there be more than one 
who have such Majority, and have an equal Number of Votes, then the House 
of Representatives shall immediately chuse by Ballot one of them for Presi- 
dent; and if no Person have a Majority, then from the five highest on the 
List the said House shall in like Manner chuse the President. But in chusing 
the President, the Votes shall be taken by States, the Representation from 
each State having one Vote ... In every Case, after the Choice of the 
President, the Person having the greatest Number of Votes of the Elec- 
tors shall be the Vice President. But if there shall remain two or more 
who have equal Votes, the Senate shall chuse from them by Ballot the Vice 
President.] ' 

The Congress may determine the Time of chusing the Electors, and the 
Day on which they shall give their Votes ; which Day shall be the same 
throughout the United States. 

No Person except a natural bom Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States 
at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office 
of President ; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not 
have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resi- 
dent within the United States. 

In Case of the Removal of the President from Office, or of his Death, 
Resignation, or Inability to discharge the Powers and Duties of the said 
Office, the Same shall devolve on the Vice President, and the Congress 
may by Law provide for the Case of Removal, Death, Resignation, or In- 

1 Superseded by Twelfth Amendment, which might well have bee;n substituted 
for this paragraph in the body of the document. 



THE FEDERAL CONSTITUTION 7 

ability, both of the President and Vice President, declaring what Officer 
shall then act as President, and such Officer shall act accordingly, until the 
Disability be removed, or a President shall be elected.^ 

The President shall, at stated Times, receive for his Services, a Com- 
pensation, which shall neither be encreased nor diminished during the Period 
for which he shall have been elected, and he shall not receive within that 
Period any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them.^ 

Before he enter on the Execution of his Office, he shall take the following 
Oath or Affirmation :— 

" I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office 
of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, pre- 
serve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States." 

Section 2. The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army 
and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when 
called into the actual Service of the United States; he may require the 
Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Depart- 
ments, upon any Subject relating to the duties of their respective Offices, 
and he shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for offences against 
the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment. 

He shall have Power, by and v/ith the Advice and Consent of the Senate, 
to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and 
he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, 
shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of 
the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appoint- 
ments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established 
by Law : but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior 
Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or 
in the Heads of Departments. 

The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen 
during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire 
at the End of their next Session. 

Section 3. He shall from time to time give to the Congress Information 
of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Mea- 
sures as he shall judge necessary and expedient; he may, on extraordinary 
Occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in Case of Disagree- 
ment between them, with Respect to the Time of Adjournment, he may ad- 
journ them to such Time as he shall think proper; he shall receive Am- 
bassadors and other public Ministers ; he shall take Care that the Laws be 

1 In 1792 Congress provided that the president pro tem of the Senate should 
be next in succession, and after him the Speaker of the House. In 1886 (Jan. 
19), this undesirable law was supplanted by a new one placing the succession 
(after the Vice President) in the following order : Secretary of State, Secretary 
of the Treasury, Secretary of War, Attorney General, Postmaster General, Secre- 
tary of the Navy, Secretary of the Interior. 

^ What is the antecedent of "them"? The salary of George Washington 
was fixed by the First Congress at $'■25,000. This amount remained unchanged 
until 1871, when it was made $50,000. In 1909 the salary was raised to $75,000. 
Large allowances are made also, in these latter days, for expenses of various sorts, 
— one item of $25,000, for instance, for traveling expenses, — which is the reason 
the salary is commonly referred to as $100,000. 



8 APPENDIX 

faithfully executed, and shall Commission all the Officers of the United States. 
Section 4. The President, Vice President, and all civil Officers of the 
United States shall be removed from office on Impeachment for, and con- 
viction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanours. 

ARTICLE in 

Section i. The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one 
supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time 
to time ordain and establish. The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior 
Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behavior, and shall, at stated 
Times, receive for their services, a Compensation, which shall not be dimin- 
ished during their Continuance in OflBce. 

Section 2. The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and 
Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and 
Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls; — to all 
Treaties made, or which shall be made, under their Authority ; — to all 
Cases of admiralty and maritime Jurisdiction ; — to Controversies to which 
the United States shall be a Party ; — to Controversies between two or more 
States ; — between a State and Citizens or another State ' ; — between 
Citizens of different States, — between Citizens of the same State claiming 
lands imder Grants of different States, — and between a State, or the Citizens 
thereof, and foreign States, Citizens or Subjects. 

In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, 
and those in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have 
original Jurisdiction. In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme 
Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such 
Exceptions, and imder such Regulations as the Congress shall make. 

The trial of all Crimes, except in Cases of Impeachment, shall be by Jury ; 
and such Trial shall be held in the State where the said Crimes shall have 
been committed ; but when not committed within any State, the Trial shall 
be at such Place or Places as the Congress may by Law have directed. 

Section 3. Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levy- 
ing War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and 
Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony 
of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court. 

The Congress shall have Power to declare the Punishment of Treason, 
but no attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture 
except during the Life of the Person attainted. 

(On the appellate jurisdiction, cf. pages 395, 396. Section 25 of the 
Judiciary Act of 1789, still in force, defines that jurisdiction as follows : 

"And be it further enacted. That a final judgment or decree in any 
suit, in the highest court of law or equity of a State in which a decision 
in the suit could be had, when is drawn in question the validity of a treaty 
or statute of, or an authority exercised under, the United States, and the 
decision is against their validity ; or when is drawn in question the validity 
of a statute of, or an authority exercised under, any State, on the ground 

^ Limited by the Eleventh Amendment to cases begun by a State. 



THE FEDERAL CONSTITUTION 9 

of their being repugnant to the Constitution, treaties, or laws of the 
United States, and the decision is in favor of such their validity ; or when 
is drawn in question the construction of any clause of the Constitution, 
or of a treaty, or statute of, or commission held under, the United States, 
and the decision is against the title, right, privilege, or exemption, specially 
set up or claimed . . . under such clause of the said Constitution, treaty, 
statute, or commission, may be re-examined, and revised or affirmed in 
the Supreme Court of the United States upon a writ of error . . ." 

The "inferior courts" at present (1920) are, from the bottom up: — 

1. District Courts. Over ninety. The law of 1789 provided for 
thirteen. 

2. Circuit Courts. Nine, each three justices. The first law, 1789, 
provided three circuit courts, but no special circuit judges ; a circuit court 
then consisted of a justice of the Supreme Court "or circuit" and one or 
more judges of district courts included within the circuit. This remained 
the rule with a brief attempt at change in 1801, until 1866, when sepa- 
rate circuit justices were provided. 

3. Circuit Courts of Appeals. One for each of the nine circuits, com- 
posed of a justice of the Supreme Court and of other Federal judges — 
not less than three in all, and not including any justice from whose deci- 
sion the appeal is taken. This order of courts was instituted in 1891, to 
relieve the Supreme Court which was then hopelessly overburdened with 
appeals from lower courts. In most cases the decision of a circuit court 
of appeals is final. 

4. The Supreme Court. One Chief Justice and eight Associate Jus- 
tices. Its business now is confined very largely to those supremely impor- 
tant matters specified in the Constitution and in the law of 1789 quoted 
above. 

There are also two special courts, somewhat outside this system : 
(1) the Federal Court of Claims, to determine money claims against the 
United States, established in 1855 ; (2) Court of Customs Appeals, estab- 
lished in 1909.) 

ARTICLE IV 

Section i. Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public 
Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State. And the 
Congress may by general Laws prescribe the Manner in which such Acts, 
Records and Proceedings shall be proved, and the Effect thereof. 

Section 2. The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges 
and immunities of Citizens in the several States. 

A Person charged in any State with Treason, Felony, or other Crime, 
who shall flee from Justice, and be found in another State, shall on Demand 
of the executive Authority of the State from which he fled, be delivered up, 
to be removed to the State having Jurisdiction of the Crime. 

[No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof 
escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, 



10 APPENDIX 

be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on 
Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due].' 

Section 3. New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union ; 
but no new State shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any 
other State ; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, 
or Parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States con- 
cerned as well as of the Congress. 

The Congress shall have Power to dispose of and make all needful Rules 
and Regulations respecting the Territory or other Property belonging to the 
United States; and nothing in this Constitution shall be so construed as to 
Prejudice any Claims of the United States, or of any particular State. 

Section 4. The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union 
a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against 
Invasion ; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the 
Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence. 

ARTICLE V 

The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, 
shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the 
Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for 
proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and 
Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of 
three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, 
as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress ; 
Provided [that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One 
thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner aflfect the first and 
fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article ; and] that no State, 
without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate. 

ARTICLE VI 

All Debts contracted and Engagements entered into, before the Adoption 
of this Constitution, shall be as valid against the United States under this 
Constitution, as imder the Confederation. 

This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made 
in Pursuance thereof ; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under 
the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; 
and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the 
Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding. 

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members 
of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both 
of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or 
Affirmation, to support this Constitution ; but no religious Test shall ever be 
required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United 
States. 

^ Superseded, so far as slaves are meant, by the Thirteenth Amendment. 



THE FEDERAL CONSTITUTION 11 

ARTICLE VII 

The Ratification of the Conventions of nine States, shall be suflBcient for 
the Establishment of this Constitution between the States so ratifying the 
Same. 

AMENDMENT 

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or 
prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, 
or of the press ; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition 
the Government for a redress of grievances. 

[ii] 
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, 
the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. 



No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the 
consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed 
by Law. 

[iv] 

The right of the people to be secure, in their persons, houses, papers, and 
effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and 
no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or 
affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the 
persons or things to be seized. 

[v] 
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, 
unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury except in cases arising 
in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of 
War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence 
to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb ; nor shall be compelled in any 
criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, 
or property, without due process of law ; nor shall private property be taken for 
public use, without just compensation. 



In all criminal prosecutions the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy 
and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime 
shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascer- 
tained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation ; 
to be confronted with the witnesses against him ; to have compulsory process 
for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for 
his defence. 

' Originally, the first twelve amendments were not numbered in the official 
manuscript. 



12 APPENDIX 



In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty 
dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a 
jury shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States, than 
according to the rules of the common law. 



[vmj 
Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel 
and imusual pimishments inflicted. 



The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be con- 
strued to deny or disparage others retained by the people. 

IX] 1 

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor 
prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively or to 
the people. 

[xi] (1798) 
The judicial power of the United States shall not be construed to extend 
to any suit in law or equity, commenced or prosecuted against one of the United 
States by Citizens of another State, or by Citizens or Subjects of any Foreign 
State. 

[xii] (1804) 
The Electors shall meet in their respective State, and vote by ballot for 
President and Vice President, one of whom, at least, shall not be an inhabitant 
of the same State with themselves ; they shall name in their ballots the person 
voted for as President, and in distinct ballots the person voted for as Vice 
President, and they shall make distinct lists of all persons voted for as F>resi- 
dent, and of all persons voted for as Vice President, and of the numbers of 
votes for each, which lists they shall sign and certify, ajid transmit sealed to 
the seat of the government of the United States, directed to the President of 
the Senate ; — The President of the Senate, shall, in the presence of the Senate 
and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall 
then be coimted ; — The person having the greatest number of votes for Presi- 
dent, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number 
of Electors appointed ; and if no person have such majority, then from the 
persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those 
voted for as President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, 
by ballot, the President. But in choosing the President, the votes shall be 
taken by States, the representation from each State having one vote ; a 
quorum for this purpose shall consist of a member or members from two thirds 
of the States, and a majority of all the States shall be necessary to a choice. 
And if the House of Representatives shall not choose a President whenever the 
right of choice shall devolve upon them, before the fourth day of March next 

^ These first ten amendments were in force after November 3, 1791. 



THE FEDERAL CONSTITUTION 13 

following, then the Vice F*resident shall act as President, as in the case of 
the death or other constitutional disability of the President. — The person 
having the greatest number of votes as Vice President, shall be the Vice 
President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors 
appointed, and if no person have a majority, then from the two highest numbers 
on the list, the Senate shall choose the Vice President ; a quorum for the pur- 
pose shall consist of two thirds of the whole number of Senators, and a 
majority of the whole number shall be necessary to a choice. But no person 
constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of 
Vice President of the United States. 



xiii (1865) 

Section i. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punish- 
ment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist 
within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. 

Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate 
legislation. 

xiv (1868) 

Section i . All persons bom or naturalized in the United States, and subject 
to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State 
wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall 
abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States: nor 
shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due 
process of law ; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal pro- 
tection of the laws. 

Section 2. Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States 
according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons 
in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any 
election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the 
United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers 
of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the 
male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of 
the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, 
or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the 
proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole 
number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State. 

Section 3. No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or 
elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, 
under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an 
oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a 
member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any 
State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in 
insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the 
enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two thirds of each House, 
remove such disability. 

Section 4. The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized 
by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for 
services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. 
But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or 



14 APPENDIX 

obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, 
or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave ; but all such debts, ob- 
ligations and claims shall be held illegal and void. 

Section 5. The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legis- 
lation, the provisions of this article. 

XV (1870) 

Section i. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be 
denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, 
color, or previous condition of servitude. 

Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appro- 
priate legislation. 

xvi (1913) 
The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from 
whatever source derived, without apportionment among the States, and with- 
out regard to any census or enumeration. 

xvii (1913) 

The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from 
each State, elected by the people thereof for six years; and each Senator 
shall have one vote. The electors in each State shall have the qualifications 
requisite for electors of the most numerous branch of the State Legislatures. 

When vacancies happen in the representation of any State in the Senate, 
the executive authority of such State shall issue writs of election to fill such 
vacancies: Provided, that the Legislature of any State may empower the 
executive thereof to make temporary appointments imtil the people fill the 
vacancies by election as the legislature may direct. 

xviii (1919) 

Section i. After one year from the ratification of this article, the manu- 
facture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation 
thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territory 
subject to the jurisdiction thereof, for beverage purposes, is hereby prohibited. 

Section 2. The Congress and the several States shall have concurrent 
power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation. 

Section 3. (Declares the article inoperative unless ratified within seven 
years.) 

xix (1920) 

Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be 
denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex. 

Section 2. The Congress shall have power by appropriate legislation to 
enforce the provisions of this article. 



INDEX 



Abolitionists, 484 ff. ; political, 489-90. 
See Slavery. 

Adams, Charles Francis, at London dur- 
ing Civil War, 551, 552. 

Adams, Henry, on Virginia settlement, 
14; on American life in 1800, 347; 
on War of 1812, 383-4. 

Adams, John, on danger of ecclesiastical 
interference by England, 175, note ; 
defense of British soldiers after Boston 
Massacrfe, 196 ; and the horse-jockey 
chent, 206 ; on resolution for State 
governments, 213 ; on vote for in- 
dependence, 216-217; on "manu- 
facture of state governments," 217 ; 
and peace negotiations in 1783, 233, 
234 ; elected Vice President, 301 ; and 
titles, 301-303 ; characterized by 
Maclay, 302, note ; reelection, 318 ; 
account of " Caucus, " 318-319 ; elec- 
tion to presidency, 318 ; dread of 
party government, 319-20; treaty of 
1800 with France, 327 ; administration 
of, 327 ff. ; Fries' Rebellion, 327-328 ; 
and Alien-Sedition laws, 328-329; 
and "Midnight Judges," 332-333; 
opposes extension of suffrage, 453. 

Adams, John Quincy, and Peace of 
Ghent, 386 ; and claims to Oregon, 
406-407; and Monroe Doctrine, 
407-410; President, 418-419; and 
election of 1828, 462, 463; and civil 
service, 458 ; and right of petition, 
488-9 ; advises New England seces- 
sion if Texas were annexed, 491. 

Adams, Samuel, " man of the town meet- 
ing, " 197; and committees of corre- 
spondence, 197 ; and ratification of the 
Constitution, 296, 298 ; on democracy, 
353. 

Administrations, presidential, table of, 
577. 

Agassiz, 444. 

Agriculture, in 1800, 346; intellect 
applied to, 351-2 ; farm machinery, 
517 ; and Morrill Bill, 545 ; in " New 
South, " 582 ; and marketing prob- 
lems : politics and cooperation, see 
Grangers, Non-Partisans. 



Aguinaldo, 617. 

Airplanes, in World War, 705-6. 

Alabama, admitted, 402. 

Alabama, The, 551-2 ; and arbitration, 
565-6. 

Alamo, massacre at, 490. 

Alaska, southern boundary fixed, 409, 
491 ; purchased, 565. 

Algonldn Indians, 5. 

Alien and Sedition Acts of 1797, 328-9. 

Amending clauses in constitutions, in 
Penn's charter, 131 ; in Revolutionary 
State constitutions, 221-2 ; in Articles 
of Confederation, 268 ; results of 
difficulty of in Federal Constitution, 
285. 

Amendments to Federal Constitution, 
difficulty of, and results, 285 ; first 
ten (" bill of rights"), 307-8; Elev- 
enth, 306-7 ; and judicial inter- 
pretation, 415; Twelfth, 334; 
Thirteenth, 548-9; Fourteenth, 560; 
and judicial interpertation, 564 ; a 
bulwark for big business privilege, 
640 ; Fifteenth, 561 ; Sixteenth, 677 ; 
Seventeenth, 668-9, 677 ; Eighteenth, 
671 ; Nineteenth, 669-671. See Con- 
stitution in appendix. 

America, Discovery of, 7. 

America, society in colonial times, 145- 
167; in 1800, 342-351; in 1830. 
421 £f. ; and intellectual ferment of 
that period, 446-8 ; in 1860, 516-22. 

American Colonization Society, 480. 

American Federation of Labor, 647 ; and 
the Worid War, 716. 

American party (" Know-Nothings "), 
506. 

American Revolution, preparation for in 
Intercolonial wars, 168-171 ; supposed 
need of English protection, 173 
opposition to standing army, 173 
Sugar Act of 1764, 174; Stamp Act 
174-5 ; underlying causes of, 175 ff. 
colonial system outgrown, 175-6 
American and English interpretations 
of " No taxation without representa- 
tion, " 176-9 ; problem of imperial 
unity, 179-82 ; and Edmund Burke, 



15 



16 



INDEX 



181-2; and George III, 182; a 
"civil war," 183-4; and social 
revolution in America, 184-7 ; and 
labor, 186 ; opens mote equal oppor- 
tunities, 186-7 ; ten years of agitation, 
188-205 ; resistance to Stamp Act, and 
repeal, 188-191 ; new taxes on 
America, 192 ff. ; internal and external 
taxation, 192-3 ; mob violence and 
denial of jury trial, 193 ; Virginia's 
resolutions of 1769, 193-4; Boston 
Massacre, 194-6 ; failure of Town- 
shend acts, 196 ; repeal of all but tea 
tax, 196 ; Revolutionary committees 
of correspondence, 197-8 ; and of 
intercolonial union, 198 ; and the tea 
ships, 199-201 ; Boston Port Bill, 
201 ; Virginia suggests Continental 
Congress, 202-4 ; First Continental 
Congress, 204-5 ; recommendations 
enforced by revolutionary means, 
206-7 ; Revolutionary de facto govern- 
ments, 207-208 ; evolve into new 
States, 208 ff. ; " thirteen revolu- 
tions," 209-10; Virginia as a type 
and a leader, 210-11 ; slow growth of 
idea of independence, 211-2; and 
Paine's Common Sense, 212 ; decision 
for independence, 214-215; and 
French influence, 214 and note ; 
Declaration of Independence, 215- 
216 ; campaigns, 217 ; new State 
constitutions, 217-23 ; Congress and 
the War, 224-32; lack of American 
unity, 224 ; inefficiency of Congress, 
224-6 ; paper money, 226-8 ; cam- 
paigns in '77-78, 228; and the 
French alliance, 228-9 ; later cam- 
paigns, 230-231 ; and the Loyalists, 
231-2; Cornwallis' surrender, 232; 
peace negotiations and treaty, 233-5 ; 
meaning of, in history, 236. 

Ames, Fisher, decries democracy, 334, 
.336. 

Andres, Sir Edmund, 116-7. 

Anesthetics, discovery of, 450. 

Angell, James B., 589. 

Annapolis Convention, 273. 

Anthony, Susan B., 669. See Nine- 
teenth Amendment, 

Antietam, 534. 

Antifederalists, 294-5. 

Appalachians, effect on early settlement, 
4. 

Appeals from colonial courts to England, 
112, 114. 118, 129, 141. 



Arbitration, International, and Jay 

Treaty, 325 ; and Maine boundary in 
1840, 477 ; and the Alabama, 565-6 ; 
failure of attempt at standing treaty 
with England, 612 ; see Hague Con- 
gresses: and the reactionary Senate, 
624; Bryan's "cooling off" treaties, 
624 ; and League of Nations, 738. 

Archbold (Justice), impeachment of, 
362, 633, note. 

Arizona, 582 ; and the recall, 668. 

Arkansas, 422. 

Arthur, Chester A., 591, 592, 593-4. 

Articles of Confederation, 250-1, 261. 
See Federal Constitution. 

Astor, John Jacob, 344, 379. 

Astoria, 379, 406. 

Atlanta, in the Civil War, 539. 

Attainder, in the Revolution, 231 and 
note ; in Federal Constitution, 29 1 , note. 

Audubon, 444. 

Australian ballot, 655. 

Austria, see World War. 

Avalon, Baltimore's province of, 42. 

Bacon's Rebellion, 122-3. 

Balkans, the, as seed plot for the World 
War, 688-95. 

Ballinger, Richard, 675. 

Ballot, evolution of in America, 82-4. 
See Australian ballot. 

Barbary Pirates, War with. 359. 

" Barnburners, " the, 49. 

Barter, trade by in early colonies, 162-3 ; 
in the early West, 245-6. 

Belgium, and World War, 703-6 

Belleau Wood, 726. 

Benton, Thomas H., and Oregon, 407, 
494; on " panic" of 1819, 413; and 
Jackson, 462 ff. ; and free access to 
public domain, 462. 

Berkeley, Sir William, 41, 120 ff. 

Berlin, Congress of 1878 at, and World 
War, 691. 

Bessemer steel, 583. 

Bethmann-Hollweg, 701. 

Bicameral legislature, demanded in 
Maryland, 44 ; secured earlier in 
Mass., 86-8, 97; relation of the two 
houses, 142-3 ; in Revolutionary 
State constitutions, 222-3. 

Biddle, Nicholas, 464, 465 ; and artificial 
panic of 1835, 469-470. 

" Big business, " growth of after rail- 
way and telegraph, 516; after 1865, 
574-5; after 1880, 585-6; gains 



INDEX 



17 



and costs, 586 ; and business im- 
morality, 586-7, 625-7 ; monopo- 
listic character of, 635-6 ; " trusts, " 
636-40 ; and fourteenth amendment, 
640; and "money power," 641; 
and " panics, " ib., and corrupt 
politics, 642-5 ; and Roosevelt, 
673-4 ; international competition of, 
and war, 684-7. 

Bills of Rights, in first Virginia con- 
stitution, 214-5 ; in other Revo- 
lutionary State constitutions, 220- 
221 ; in Northwest Ordinance, 255 ; 
none in Federal Constitution as 
adopted, 291 and note; added by 
first ten amendments, 307-8. 

Birney, James G., political abolitionist, 
487, 492. 

" Black Friday, " 603. 

Black Hawk War, 469, note. 

Blaine, James G., 572 and note, 594, 
595, 610, 622. 

" Blue Laws, " colonial, 145-7. 

" Body of Liberties," of early Massachu- 
setts, 85-6. 

Bolshevists, the, 718, 743-7. 

Bonaparte, Napoleon, and Louisiana, 
370-1 ; and American commerce be- 
fore 1812, 380-3. 

Boone, Daniel, 241, 242, 243, 244. 

Boone's Fort, 166. 

" Boss," in politics, 460-1. 

Boston, early history, 65, 83, 94, 142. 

Boston Centinel, the, and second and 
third " pillars, " 390-1. 

" Boston Massacre, " the, 194-6. 

Bowdoin, James, 1.33. 

Bradford, William, on Gorges, 48 ; on 
Plymouth history, 50, 61 ; governor 
and trustee, 57, 58, 60 ; on Roger 
Williams, 93. 

Brandeis, Louis, 653. 

Breckenridge, John C, 523, 524, 525. 

Brest-Litovsk, Peace of, 724. 

Bristow, Banjamin H., 567. 

Brook Farm, 448. 

Brooke, Lord, on religious freedom, 96- 
7 ; and Massachusetts, 97. 

Brown, John, in Kansas, 509 ; at Harpers 
Ferry, 515. 

Brown University, 152. 

Bryan, William J., in 1896, 607-9; 
reviled by conservatives, 608 ; and 
" cooHng off " treaties, 624 ; and 
campaign of 1912, 677-9 ; and the 
World War, 716. 



Bryant, William Cullen, 444. 

Bryce, James (Lord), on the West, 237; 
on judicial amendment of the Con- 
stitution, 285. 

Buchanan, James, 494, 510, 511, 513, 
514, 528, 531. 

Bull Run, battle of, 534. 

Burgoyne's capture, 228. 

Burke, Edmund, on American taxation, 
181-2. 

Butler, Benjamin F., and "contraband," 
546. 

Byrd, WiUiam (Colonel), 124-5. 

Cabinet, the President's, evolution of, 
304, 305 and note. 

Cabot, George, decries democracy, 334. 

Cahokia, 233, 236. 

Calhoun, John C, a " war hawk, " 382, 
383 ; and the Bonus Bill, 398 ; change 
on the tariff, 463 ; and nullification, 
463, 465-6 ; and Jackson, 469 and 
note ; and slavery, 482 S. ; and 
squatter sovereignty, 497 ; opposes 
Compromise of 1850, 502; plan for 
dual presidency, 502. 

California, and Mexican War, 493-4 ; 
discovery of gold, 498 ; growth and 
turbulence, 398-9 ; vigilantes, 499 ; 
and President Taylor, 499 ; admitted 
" free, " 499-501 ; and Southern 
Pacific R.R., 640; and Hiram John- 
son, 640 ; progressiveness, 653, 664-5, 
668. 

California vs. Southern Pacific, the case 
of, 640. 

Calvert, Cecilius, 42. 

Calvert, George (first Lord Baltimore), 
41-2. 

Calvin, John, and democracy, 76. 

Canada, see France in America; be- 
comes English, 137, 169; effect of 
this change on American Revolution, 
168-9 ; and Quebec Act, 201 and note ; 
and Treatv of 1783, 233, 234; and 
World War, 704. 

Canning, George, insolence toward 
America, 380 ; and Holy Alliance, and 
Monroe Doctrine, 407-8. 

Capitalist system, rise of, 429-30. 

Carolinas, the, 107, 127 ; Huguenots in, 
ib., royal province, 140; and the 
democratic western counties, 185-6. 
See North and South Carolina. 

Carpetbaggers, 561-2. 

Carranza, 683. 



18 



INDEX 



Carver, John, 54, 58. 

Cass, Lewis, 492, 498. 

Caucus, John Adams' account of at 
Boston, 318-9 ; and rise of Con- 
gressional for nomination of presi- 
dential candidates, ib. ; overthrow of 
" King Caucus, " 418. 

Centralization, in New France, 12-3. 

Champlain, Samuel de, founds Quebec, 
9 ; and Iroquois, 10. 

Channing, William EUery, and labor, 
434 ; and Unitarianism, 445-6 ; and 
abolitionism, 485. 

Charter colonies, and other classes, 140- 
141. 

Chase, Salmon P., abolitionist, 489 ; 
Secretary of Treasury, 54.3-4; posi- 
tion as Chief Justice on Legal Tender 
cases, 564. 

Chase, Samuel (Justice), on Declaration 
of Independence, 260-261 ; denun- 
ciation of democracy, 361 ; attempt 
to impeach, 362. 

Chateau Thierry, 726. 

Chattanooga, 537. 

Chicago, beginnings of, 423. 

Child labor, in New England in 1830, 
431-3; in the New South, 653-4, 
682. 

Children's Bureau, 654. 

China, and the open door, 620 ; and 
territorial integrity, 620 ; and the 
World War, 717; and the Peace 
Treaty (Shantung), 741. 

Chisholm vs. Georgia, 306-7. 

Cities, growth of, in 1790 and 1800, 342 ; 
in 1830, 421-423; in 1860, 520; in 
1860-1920, 578. 

Civil service, and party, under Wash- 
ington and Adams, 359 ; and Jefferson, 
359-61 ; Crawford's four-year bill, 
458 ; not abused by Adams, 458 ; and 
Jackson's spoils sy.stem, 458-9 ; and 
Lincoln, 530 and note, agitation for 
reform after 1871, 591; and Grant, 
591 ; and Hayes, 591 ; and campaign 
of 1880, 591-2; and law of 1883, 
593-4; extension, 672. 

Civil War, the, secession, and the South- 
ern Confederacy, 526-8; attempt at 
compromise, 529 ; and Lincoln, 529- 
530; Fort Sumter, 531-.532 ; Bull 
Run, 534 ; Northern strategy, 534 ff. ; 
the blockade, 535-6 ; campaigns, 
537-9 : resources of the sections, 540 ; 
military prisons, 542 ; drafts, 542-3 ; 



war finance, 543-6; Confederate cur- 
rency, 545; Southern devotion, 546; 
and slavery, 546-9 ; and Europe, 
549-53; cost, 553; results, 554-5. 
See Reconstruction. 

Clark, Champ, 678-9. 

Clark, George Rogers. 233-44, 247. 

Clarke, James Freeman, 485. 

Class strife, see Labor. 

Clay, Henry, a "war hawk", 283-3; 
champion of protection, 414; and 
election of 1824, 418-9; duel, 419; 
in 1830, 464 ; and Jackson and the 
Bank, 464-5 ; Preemption Act, 473-4 ; 
favors Missouri Compromise, 482 ; 
defeated in 1844, 492 ; and Texas, 
49]r-2 ; the " great pacificator, " 500; 
and Omnibus Bill, 500-2. 

Clayton Anti-Trust Act, 680-1. 

Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, 519 ; waived by 
England, 622-3. 

Clemenceau, 722 ; see Peace Congress, 
passim, 731-47. 

Clermont, Fulton's, 369. 

Cleveland, Grover, election, 594 ; and 
civil service, 595 ; and tariff reduction, 
595-6 ; vetoes, 597 note ; election of 
1892, 599; and Wilson tariff, 599; 
and bond issues, 607 ; and the " money 
power, " and radicals, ib., note; and 
Hawaii, 611 ; and Venezuelan -arbi- 
tration, 611-612; urges standing 
treaty of arbitration, 612 ; and rail- 
road land grants, 628 ; and Pullman 
strike, 649. 

Clinton, DeWitt, and Erie Canal, 401. 

Clinton, George, 301. 

Coal, used for power, 421 ; for smelting 
iron, 450. 

Cohens vs. Virginia, 415. 

Coke, Sir Edward, .36. 

Collective bargaining, 657-8. 

Colombia, and the Panama Canal, 623 
and note. 

Colorado, 580. 

Columbus, 7, 8. 

Commerce, colonial, 161-2; of the West 
and the Mississippi, 246-7 ; in 1800, 
344 ; Western in 1800, 367-8 ; during 
European wars near 1800, 381-2. See 
Big Business. 

Commerce Court, the, 632 and note. 

" Committee on Public Information, " 
in World War, 749-750. 

Common Law, English, and colonial 
charters, 23-24 ; a bond of union 



INDEX 



19 



among the colonies, 140-1 ; colonists, 
rights in, 143 ; formally adopted in 
Revolutionary State constitutions, 
320 ; and the early labor movement, 
435 ; and status of women, 449. 

Commons, John R., on labor and public 
domain, 473. 

Communication, colonial, 3-4 ; and 
native trails, 7 ; in the West, 246- 
7 ; in 1800, 344, 367-8 ; and the 
steamboat, 368, 395-6 ; improved 
after 1815, 395-402; canals, 401-2. 
See Railroad, Telegraph, etc. 

Concord, battle of, 207. 

Confederate States of America, 527 ff. 
See Civil War. 

Connecticut, democratic ideal, 98 ; 
founded, 101-2 ; Fundamental Orders, 
102-3 ; theocracy in, 103 ; and New 
England Confederation, 104 ; charter, 
113-4; and royal commission, 114- 
115; under Andros, 116-117; and 
state constitution, 218 ; manhood 
franchise, 456 ; gradual emancipation 
of slaves, 479. 

Connecticut Compromise, the, 281, 
282-3. 

Conservation of natural resources, 673. 

Constellation, The, and the Vengeance, 
326. 

Constitution of the United States, see 
Federal Constitution. 

Constitutions, Revolutionary State, 218- 
23 ; popular ratification only in Mass. 
and New Hamp., 218-20 ; start of 
in Mass., 219 ; checks on democracy, 

220, 223; franchise, 20, and religion, 

221, and executive veto, 221 ; defi- 
ciency of amending clauses, 221-2. 

Continental Congress, First, 202-205; 
Second, election of, 208-209 ; becomes 
a government, 209 ; and Declaration 
of Independence, 215-217 ; weak- 
ness, 226 ff., 263-264 ; expiring days, 
300. 

Continental currency, 226-7. 

Contraband, in international law, 322. 

Convention (nominating and platform) 
system in politics, 459. 

Conway Cabal, 229. 

Cooper, James Fenimore, 444. 

Cooperative societies (agricultural), 658- 
60. 

Copley, John Singleton, 349. 

Corinth, battle of, 537. 

Cornell University, 589. 



Cotton, and the Industrial Revolution, 
345 ; and Civil War, which see. 

Cotton, John, decries democracy, 76, 79, 
80 ; story of, 79, note. 

Cotton gin, Whitnej^'s, 345. 

Cowpens, battle of, 230. 

Cradock, Matthew, 71. 

Crashaw's Daily Prayer for Virginia, 
quoted, 21 and note. 

Crawford, W. H., 418; and tenure-of- 
office bill, 458. 

Credit Mobilier, 569-71. 

" Critical Period " in American history, 
263-8 ; State sovereignty principle, 
263 ; bankruptcy, 264 ; strife between 
States, 265 ; anarchy within States, 
265 ff. ; fiat money, 266; Shays' 
Rebellion, 267 ; evils due to weakness 
of Central government, 268. See 
Articles of Confederation. 

Cuba, Slave Power's attempts to secure, 
494 ; revolt against Spain, 612 ; and 
Spanish-American War, 612-3 ; settle- 
ment with, 616. 

Cummins-Esch bill, 635. 

Cutler, Mannasseh, 253, 256. 

Daguerreotypes, 450. 

Dakotas, the, 581. See North and South 
Dakota. 

Dale, Sir Thomas, and Virginia, 29- 
30. 

Dana, James Dwight, 444. 

Dartmouth College Case, 292. 

Davis, Jefferson, 400, 527. 

Deaf, first schools for, 449. 

Debow's Review, quoted, 484. 

Debs, Eugene V., 650 and note, 661. 

Debt, Imprisonment for, 349, 438. 

Declaration of Independence, growth of 
feeling in favor of, 211-212; in- 
structions for in Virginia, 213-214 ; 
penned by .Jefferson, 215-216; adop- 
tion, 216 ; ratified by New York, 216 ; 
by one people or thirteen, 260-263. 

Delaware, 107, 117. 

Democratic party, origin. 419-20. 

Dennie's Portfolio, decries democracy, 
334-5. 

Dewey, George, at Manila, 614 ; and 
the German fleet, 614-5. 

Dickens, Charles, and America, 424. 

Dickinson, John, and distrust of democ- 
racy in Federal Convention, 277. 

Diedrich, Admiral von, and Dewey, 614- 
615. 



20 



INDEX 



Direct primaries, 665-6. 
Dix, Dorothy, 449. 
Donelson, Fort, 537. 

Dorchester, 65 ; and growth of democ- 
racy, 87-8 ; and town meeting, 88 ; 

migration to Connecticut, 101-2. 
Dorr, Thomas Wilson, and Dorr's 

Rebellion, 477-8. 
Douglas, Stephen A., 492, 506-8, 512, 

513, 52.3-4, 531. 
Drake, Sir Francis, 14, 15. 
Drayton, Michael, the Ode to Virginia, 

21-2. 
Dred Scott decision, 510-511; and 

Supreme Court, 511-512. 
Ducking stool, the, 145. 
Dudley, Thomas, on the first winter at 

Boston, 69. 
Dunmore's War, 243-4. 
Dwight, Theodore, decries democracy, 

335. 

Education, in the colonies, 151-6 ; and 
Northwest Ordinance and Survey 
Ordinance, 255-6 ; and grant for 
State Universities, 256-7; in 1800, 
349-50 ; and the early labor move- 
ment, 432-3, 437, 440-2 ; revival 
after 1830, in Massachusetts, 433 ; in 
Northwest, ih. ; State systems, ih. ; 
intellectual ferment after 1830, 446- 
448 ; in the South in 1860, 522 ; higher 
education after 1870, 589. 

Edwards, Jonathan, 151. 

Eight-hour day, demand for, 652 ; rail- 
way law of 1916, 656-7. 

Elections, Presidential, etc., 1788, 300- 
1; 1792, 318; 1796, 318; and the 
Congressional caucus, 319 ; of 1800, 
331-3; 1804, 333-4; 1808, 382; 
1812, 382-3; of 1816, 418; of 1820, 
418; of 1824, 418-9; 1828, 453-6, 
462-3; of 1832, 465; 1836, 472; 
1840,475; 1844,491-2; 1848,497-8; 
of 1852, 505; 1856, 510; 1860, 523- 
5; '62 and '64, 548; 1868, 561; 
1872, 567 ; 1876, 571-2 ; 1880, 591-2 ; 
1884, 594-5; 1888, 595-6; 1892, 
599; 1896, 600, 607-8; 1900, 618-9; 
1904, 672; 1908, 674-5; 1910 (insur- 
gent movement), 676-7 ; 1912, 777-9 ; 
1916, 711-2; 1918 (Congressional), 
735; 1920, 755-7. 

Electoral college, 290 ; and party 
nominations (" letter carriers"), 319; 
popular vote for, 455. 



Electoral Commission of 1877, 573. 

Emancipation Proclamation, 547, 548, 
549 note. 

Embargo of 1807, and failure, 382; 
and secession movement in New Eng- 
land, 387-8. 

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, Concord in- 
scription, 207 ; place in literature, 
444-6 ; and democracy, 445-6 ; and 
new " religions, " 446; on social Uto- 
pias, 448 ; on abolitionists, 485 ; on 
Webster's Seventh of March speech, 
502; on Fugitive Slave law, 503; 
on John Brown's scaffold, 515. 

Endicott, John, 62, 63, 65, 94. 

England, English roots of American 
freedom, 1 ; English advantages in 
colonization, 14-15 ; rivalry with 
Spain, 14 ; and royal charters, 16-17 ; 
industrial conditions in, favoring 
colonization, 19, 68 ; growth of 
colonial poHcy after 1660, 107-8; 
navigation acts, 108-12 ; attempts at 
closer control of colonies after 1690, 
132, 137-44 ; and writs of assistance, 
171-2 ; and Grenville's plan for taxing 
America, 172-5 ; colonial system vex- 
ing rather than tyrannical, 175 ff. ; 
see American Revolution; and other 
foes, 229, 236 ; magnanimity of feeling 
in, regarding Revolution, 236 ; rela- 
tions with America after 1792, 322-4 ; 
and Jay Treaty, 324-6 ; and the slave 
trade, 480-1 ; and American Civil 
War, 549-53 ; and Venezuelan ar- 
bitration, 611-2 ; and Spanish- 
American War, 614-5 ; and Triple 
Entente, 688-9 ; and Treaty of Berlin 
in 1878, 691-2 ; peacemaker in 1913, 
695 ; attempts for peace in 1914, 700 ; 
unprepared for war, 701 ; statement 
of war aims, 701-2 ; and the World 
War, which see ; and the Peace 
Congress, which see. 

Entail, 159. 

Esch-Cummins Act, 635. 

Erie Canal, 401. 

Evans, George H. and Frederick W., 
labor leaders, 435-6. 

Evans, Oliver, 368. 

Everett, Edward, 444. 

Factory legislation, 654-5. Factory 

system (or capitalist system), 428. 
Faneuil, Peter, 1.33. 
Farm-Loan Act, 680. 



INDEX 



21 



Farmer " Non-Partisan " movement, 

658-60. 
Federal Constitution, the, see Critical 
Period and Articles of Confederation; 
failure of attempts to amend Articles, 
269-70 ; need of fundamental change, 
271 ; steps leading to Federal Con- 
vention, 272-4 ; make-up and leaders 
of Convention, 275 ; distrust of 
democracy among, 276-9 and 
passim; absence of democratic leaders 
from Convention, 279 ; conflict of 
interests, 279 ; devotion to experience, 
280; Virginia Plan, 280; New 
Jersey Plan, 281 ; steps in making 
Constitution, 281 ; defections, 281-2 ; 
conflicts between large and small 
States, 282-3 ; character of our 
government — partly national, 283-4 ; 
"enumerated" powers, 284; and 
implied powers, 285 ; " necessary and 
proper," 286; apportionment of 
representation, 286-7 ; federal judi- 
ciary, 288-9 ; electoral college, 290 ; 
checks and balances, 290-1 ; 
guardianship of wealth, 291-2 ; lack 
of bill of rights, 291 (but see amend- 
ments) ; and the franchise, 293-4 ; 
ratification of, 294-7 ; by States or 
people, 297-9 ; broad and loose con- 
struction, 312. See Amending clauses, 
and document in Appendix. 
Federal Convention, at Philadelphia, see 

Federal Constitution. 
Federal government, two types, 270-1. 
Federal judiciary, in the Constitution, 
288 ff. ; power to void laws, 288 and 
note, 292; life tenure, 289-90; 
appellate jurisdiction and the Act of 
1789, 305-6; and Eleventh amend- 
ment, 306-7 ; Act of 1801, 332, 333, 
358; " Midnight Judges, " 333 ; parti- 
sanship after 1800, 361 ; and Jefferson, 
361-3; John Marshall, 362-3, 415-6; 
and the States, 417; Dred Scott 
Case and Republican defiance, 511-2 ; 
and Reconstruction, 563-4 ; and in- 
come tax decisions, 599-600 ; and 
Philippine tariff, 618, note, 619 ; and 
Interstate Commerce Act, 632 ; pro- 
gressive decisions, 632 ; and Clayton 
Act, 680-1. 
Federal Reserve Act, 680. 
Federal Trade Commission, 680. 
Federalist, the, 295 ; quoted, 298-9. 
Federalist party, 294 and note ; victory 



in 1788, 295-7 ; 12-years rule, 300 ff. ; 
rise of true party government, 316 ff. ; 
and Federalist distrust of democracy, 
328-35 ; and election of 1800, 331-4 ; 
services, 336 ; almost extinct in 1801, 
363 ; revived by embargo and war, 
and secession tendencies of, 382, 
387-392 ; final fall, 392. 
Fillmore, Millard, 500. 
Fiske, " Jim, " 603. 
Fitch, John, 368. 
Flume incident, the, 737. 
Florida (see Spam) , becomes English, 
137 ; returned to Spain, and acqui- 
sition by U. S., 374-7 ; statehood, 
496. 
Foch, Ferdinand, 726, 728. 
Foote's Resolution, on Western lands, 

466-7. 
" Forty-niners," the, 499. 
" Fourteen Points," Woodrow Wilson's, 

723-4 ; and the Peace, 742. 
Fox, Charles, 182, 233. 
France, in America, 4, 9-13 ; and 
Intercolonial Wars, 136-7 ; ceases 
to be American power, 137 ; and 
American Revolution, 228-9, 232; 
see French Revolution; relations with 
America after 1792, 320-2 ; " war " 
of 1800, 326-7; and Louisiana, 370- 
371 ; and West Florida, 375 ; and 
American Civil War, 550, 552 ; and 
European alliances after 1871, 687-9. 
See World War and Peace Congress. 
Franchise, colonial, 52, 74 ff. esp. 82, 
120, 121, 123, 125; and the Revolu- 
tion, 185, 186 ; in Revolutionary State 
constitutions, 222 ; in Vermont, 223- 
4; and in Western settlements, 241, 
245 ; and the Federal Constitution, 
293; extension before 1828, 453-4; 
and Dorr's Rebellion, 477-8. 
Frankland, " State " of, 245-6. 
Franklin, Benjamin, and first sub- 
scription library, 153; and U. of 
Penn., 152; and Albany Plan, 168; 
theory of " personal union " of 
America and England, 180 ; approves 
Otis' plan, 181 ; and Stamp Act, 188 ; 
early attitude toward independence. 
211; in France, 228-9; and peace 
negotiations, 233-4 ; and Federal 
Convention, 278, 279, 283, 293. 
Free land, and democracy, 351, 433-4. 
" Free silver, " 604-8, 618-9. 
Free Soil parties, 498-9, 505. 



oa 



INDEX 



Free speech, denied by Mass. Puritans, 
87 ; established in Zenger Case, 143- 
4 ; and First amendment, 307-8 ; 
and the Slave Power, 486-8 ; and 
New York Assembly's expulsion of 
Socialists, 661. See Religious Free- 
dom. 

Freedman's Bureau, 556. 

Fremont, John C, 509, 547. 

French Revolution, and America, 
320 ff. 

French and Indian wars, 1690-1763, 
136-7 ; and (causes) 10-13 ; and prep- 
aration for American Revolution, 
168-9, 172. 

Fries' Rebellion, 327-8. 

Frontiers, in American history, 133, 
165-6; influence, see West. 

Fugitive Slave Law, of 1793, 313-4; of 
1850, 501, 502, 503-5. 

Fulton, Robert, 369. 

Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, 
102-3. 

Fur trade, and early settlement, 55, 57, 
58; in 1800, 346; and War of 1812, 
383. 

Gadsden, Christopher, 189, 211. 

Gadsden Purchase, 494. 

Gallatin, Albert, 353, 359, 360. 365, 366, 

386, 485. 
Galloway, Joseph, 204. 
Garfield, James A., 592-3. 
Garrison, William Lloyd, 484-6, 487. 
Gaspee, The, 198. 
General warrants, 170, 171, 214. 
" General welfare " clause, 285-6. 
Genet, " Citizen ", 321. 
Geography, and American history, 2-4, 

126-7, 13.3-6, 338. 339, .341-2. 
George, Henry, 662, 665. 
George UI, 182-4. 
Georgia, 133, 140, 206, 217, 222, 306-7, 

350, 468-9, 486, 526. 
Germans in America, after 1690, 133 ; 

save Missouri to Union, 533. 
Germany, and Spanish-American War, 

614-5; and China, 620; opposes 

arbitration and disarmament, 624 ; 

see World War and Pence Conqress. 
Gerry, Elbridge, decries democracy, 

276, 277 ; refuses to sign Constitution, 

281-2. 
Gettysburg, 5.34. 
Ghent. Peace ot, 386. 
Gilbert, Sir Humphrey, 16. 



Gladstone, W. E., 280, 550. 

Glavis, Louis, 675. 

Gompers, Samuel, 647. 

Gordon. G. W., 540. 

Gorges. Robert, 47, 48. 

Gosnold, Bartholomew, 20. 

Gould, " Jay, " and Grant, 603. 

Grangers, the, 630-631. 

Grant, U. S., in Civil War, 537-542; 
and generosity to conquered, 555 ; 
President, 561, 567-8 ; review of life, 
568-9 ; and Wall Street, 603. 

Gray, Asa, 444. 

Great Western, the, and first steam 
navigation of Atlantic, 450. 

Greeley, Horace, 476, 528-9, 567. 

" Greenbacks," 543, 603-4; Greenback 
parties, 592, 604. 

Grenville, George, and American taxa- 
tion, 172-5. 

Guam, acquired, 615. 

Hadley, Arthur, on property rights and 
the Constitution, 292. 625. 

Hague Congresses, 624. 

Haig, Sir Douglas, 726. 

Haiti, 622. 

Hakluyt, Richard, 14, 18. 

Hamilton. Alexander, on New York's 
" accession " to the Union, 261 ; on 
need of a federal state, 271 ; and call 
for Convention, 272, 273: distrust 
of democracy, 278-9, 335 ; weakened 
at Philadelphia by absence of col- 
leagues, 282 and note ; wished to 
limit franchise, 293 ; and the 
Federalist, 295 ; and ratification of 
Constitution, 297 ; characterized by 
Maclay, 302, note ; Secretary, 304 ; 
on power of Federal judiciary and the 
States, 307; financial policy, 308- 
311 ; consolidating influence of same, 
310-311 ; and the new Federalist 
party, 317; services, 336; and plots 
for New England secession, 387 ; and 
death, 387 ; and protective tariffs, 
412. 

Hancock, John, 295. 

Hancock, W. S., 540. 

Hanna, Mark, 609. 

Harding, Warren G., 756. 

Harlan (.Justice), on Income Tax deci- 
sion, 600 ; on Interstate Commerce 
decisions, 6.32. 

Harrison, Benjamin, 597. 

Harrison, William Henry, 395, 475. 



INDEX 



23 



Hartford Convention, 389-91. 
Harvard, 152, 155; in 1800, 349; and 

Unitarianisni, 446. 
Harvey, Sir John, and Virginia, 39, 40. 
Hawaii, 518, 610, 611, 616. 
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 444. See Brook 

Farm. 
Hay, John, 620, 624. 
Hayes, R. R., 572, 591. 
Hayne, R. Y., and debate with Webster, 

466-7. 
Henry, Patrick, Resolutions, 188-9 ; 

an " American " 263 ; and Federal 

Convention, 274 ; opposes ratification 

of Constitution, 298. 
Hepburn Act, 632-4. 
Higginson, Francis, 63. 65, 90. 
Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 485, 

505. 
High Cost of Living, rise after 1890, 602. 
Holmes, Oliver W., 444. 
Holmes vs. Walton, 289. 
Holy Alliance, 407-8. 
Homestead policy, and Andrew Johnson, 

514 ; and Freesoilers, 514 ; Buchan- 
an's veto, ib., law of 1862, 514, 515 ; 

and Reconstruction, 555. 
Hooker, " Fighting Joe, " 540. 
Hooker, Thomas, 90, 101-2, 104. 
Hoover, Herbert C, 750. 
Hope Factory, and the long day, 430- 

431. 
Hopkins, Stephen, and the Gaspee 

incident, 198. 
Horseshoe Bend, 396. 
Houston, " Sam ", 490, 597, note. 
Howe, Julia Ward, 669. 
Howe Sewing Machine, 450. 
Howells, William Dean, quoted, 447. 
Hughes, Charles Evans, 711-2. 
Huguenots, excluded from New France, 

13 ; in English colonies, 133. 
Hutchinson, Anne, 94-6. 
Hutchinson, Thomas, 191, 196. 

Idaho, 581. 

Illinois, County of, 250. 

Illinois, 402, 471-81. 

Immigration, after 1815, 393-4 ; about 

1840, 496 ; from 1860 to 1920, 578-80. 
" Imperialism, " after Spanish War, 

617-9. 
Implied powers, 285-6 ; and National 

Bank, 312 ; and Supreme Court, 415. 
Impressments, and War of 1812, 322-3, 

383-4. 



Income tax, of 1862, 543 ; of 1893, 599 ; 

and Supreme Court, 599-600 ; of 

1913, 680; after World War, 751, 754. 
Indentured servants, 19. See Servants. 
Independent Treasury, the, 472. 
Indiana, Territory of, 258; State, 402; 

education, 443; " Black laws," 481. 
Indians, 5-7. 

Indian Territory, 469 ; becomes Okla- 
homa, 582. 
Industrial Revolution, 425-8. 
Industrial Workers of the World 

(I.W.W.), 661. 
Initiative (Popular), 219-20, 666-7. 
Injunction, " Government by," 650, 

651, 681-2. 
Intercolonial wars, see French and 

Indian. 
Internal improvements, 365-6 ; 396-8, 

.399. 
Interstate Commerce Act, 632. See 

Hepburn Act, Clayton Act. 
Inventions, 72, 352, 449-50, 517-8. See 

Railroad, Steamboat, etc. 
Iowa, 496. 
Irish, immigration of, after the " famine, " 

394 note, 496. See Scotch-Irish. 
Iron Works, colonial, 72, 138; in 1800, 

345, 450 ; in New South, 582. 
Iroquois, the, 6, 10-11. 
Irving, Washington, 444. 
Island No. 10, capture, 537. 

Jackson, Andrew, at New Orleans, 385 ; 
Horse Shoe Bend, 395 ; election of 
1824, 418-9; victory of 1828 and 
significance, 454 ff. ; personality, 
456-7 ; and prerogative, 457-8 ; and 
" spoils, " 458-9 ; " reign " of, 462 fT. ; 
and the Bank, 464-5, 469-470; 
reelection, 465 ; and nullification, 
465-9 ; and Georgia's nullification, 
468-9 ; specie circular, 471-2 ; and 
Van Buren, 472. 

Jackson, " Stonewall ", 540-41. 

Jacksonian Democracy, and Jeffersonian, 
454-5. 

Jamaica, 107, 111, 139. 

Jamestown, 24-8. 

Japan, 318. See World War, Shantung, 
Peace Congress. 

Jay, John. 204, 211, 233-4, 295; and 
Jay Treaty, 324-6. 

Jefferson, Thomas, hesitates on inde- 
pendence in 1775, 211; pens Decla- 
ration, 215-6 ; on ease of transition 



24 



INDEX 



to independent states, 218 ; on need of 
popular ratification of constitutions, 
218 ; encourages Clark's conquest of 
Northwest, 233 ; and Territorial 
Ordinance of 1784 (anti-slavery), 
252 ; characterized by Maclay, 302 
note ; on defeat of proposal for pres- 
idential titles, 303; Secretary, 304 
and Hamilton's finance, 310-311 
and new Republican party, 317 
vice president, 318 ; alarm at alien- 
sedition acts, 329 ; and Kentucky 
Resolutions, 329-30 ; election of 
1800, 331-3 ; and a better plow, 
346 ; the man, 353-4 ; career to 
1800, 354-6; principles, 356; fore- 
shadows Monroe Doctrine and world 
peace, 356-7 ; simplicity, 357-8 ; and 
economy, 359 ; and civil service, 359- 
61 ; and judiciary, 360-3 ; reelec- 
tion, 363; declines 3d term, 363-4; 
centralizing influences in 2nd term, 
364-6 ; Louisiana Purchase, 370-4 ; 
explorations, 378-9 . and foreign 
relations, 380-2 ; secures Madison's 
election, 382 ; and Monroe Doctrine, 
409, 410 ; favored Missouri Com- 
promise, 482. 

Jefifersonian Democracy, 454-5. 

Johns Hopkins University, 589. 

Johnson, Andrew, and early labor move- 
ment, 437 ; first homestead bill, 514 : 
and career to 1861, 537; president, 
557-8 ; and Reconstruction, 558 ; 
and Congress, 558-61. 

Johnson, Hiram, 640, 665. 

Johnston, Albert Sidney, 540. 

Johnston, J. E., 540. 

Judiciary Act of 1789 (appellate juris- 
diction), 305-6. 

Judiciary, see Federal Judiciary. 

Kalm, Peter, 169. 

Kanawha, battle of the Great, 243-4. 

Kansas, see Kansas-Nebraska Bill; 

"bleeding iCansas ", 508-9, 512; 

struggle for statehood, 513 ; admission, 

580. 
Kansas-Nebraska Bill, 506-8. 
Kaskaskia, 233, 236. 
Kentucky, settlement, 233, 238 fT. ; 

Boone, 241-2, 244; Dunmore's War, 

243 ; basis for conquest of Northwest, 

244 ; separatist movements, 246-7 ; 
admitted, 248, 314; and democracy, 
314; rapid growth, 367. 



Kentucky Resolutions, of 1798-9, 329- 

30. 
Kerensky, 718. 744. 
Key, Francis Scott, 386. 
King PhiUp's War, 115. 
King's College (Columbia), 152. 
King's Mountain, battle of, 230. 
Knights of Labor, 647. 
Know-Nothing party, 506. 
Ku-Klux-Klan, 562-3. 

Labor, in the American Revolution, 
186, 206-7 ; and demand for popular 
ratification of constitution in New 
York, 218 ; beginnings of organization 
in America, 425-8 ; iiew conditions, 
428; class defined, 429; the long 
day, 430-1; .lack of schooling, 431-2; 
lack of land, 433-4 ; early unions 
before 1800, 434-5 ; early strikes, 
prosecuted for conspiracy, 435 ; hos- 
tile courts, 435 ; and the press, 435-6 : 
first labor papers, 435-6 ; from 1825 to 
1837, 436 ff. ; strikes for ten-hour day, 
436, 439-440; " man above the 
dollar," 439; and schools, 440-2; 
and closed shop, 439 ; political action, 
437-8 ; and public domain, 473 , 
organizations destroyed by panic of 
'37, 439; organization after 1865, 
646 ff. ; Knights of Labor, 647 ; A. F. 
of L., 646 ; and railway strikes of '77, 
'94, and 1902, 648-50; and " govern- 
ment by injunction, " 650-1 ; and 
use of violence, 561-2 ; and eight- 
hour day, 652-3 ; and child labor, 
653-4 ; and living wage, 653 ; factory 
acts, 654 ; compensation acts, 655 ; 
closed shop, 657-8 ; democratization 
of industry, 658. See Socialism. 

Lafayette, in American Revolution, 228. 

La Foflette, Robert M., 664, 665-6, 677. 

Land policy, sec Public Domain. 

Land Survey Ordinance, of 1785, 255, 
256. 

League of Nations, 713-4 ; and the 
Peace Congress, 736; the Covenant, 
738-9 ; and the United States, 756. 

Lee, Richard Henry, 190-1, 263, 270. 

Lee, Robert E., 539 and note, 540. 

Legal Tender Acts, 543 ; and Supreme 
Court decisions, 564. 

Lenin, Nikolai, 718, 743-7. 

Lewis and Clark's expedition, 378-9. 

Lexington, battle of, 165, 167, 207, 208. 

Liberia, 480. 



INDEX 



25 



Liberty party (1844), 492. 

Lichnowsky, 695, 698 and note, 700. 

Lincoln, Abraham, early life, 400 ; and 
the abolitionists, 485-6 ; condemns 
Supreme Court for Dred Scott deci- 
sion, 511 ; debates with Douglas, 512 ; 
on slav'ery, 512 ; election of 1860, 
523-5 ; willing to accept amendment 
to forbid interference with slavery in 
States, 529; 1st inaugural, 529-30; 
the man, 530 ; and civil service, 530 ; 
and slavery (13th amendment), 548- 
9 ; assassination, 554 ; and Recon- 
struction, 556-7 ; and proposal for 
Negro franchise, 559. 

Literature, outburst in after 1830, 444- 
5 ; and Unitarianism, 445-6. 

Lloyd-George, 723. See World War. 
Peace Congress. 

Local self-government, lacking in New 
France, 12-13 ; growth in New 
England, see Town meeting; and Vir- 
ginia, 121, 125; Virginian and New 
England types, 126-7. 

Loco Foco party, 438. 

Lodge, Henry Cabot, 594. 

London Company, for Virginia, 30-36 ; 
overthrow, 37; use of ballot, 36, 82, 
note; and the Pilgrims, 51, 52. 

Long, Crawford W., and anesthetics, 450. 

Long Island, battle of, 217. 

Longfellow, Henry W., 444. 

Longstreet, James, 540. 

Lorimer, and the Senate, 669. 

Lotteries, opposed by early labor 
organizations, 439, note. 

Louisiana Purchase, 370 ff. ; and con- 
stitutional problems, 372-4 ; and 
West Florida and Texas, which see. 

Louisiana, Spanish territory, 137 ; ac- 
quired by U. S., 370 ff. ; District of, 
373 ; attached to Indiana Territory, 
which see ; State of, 373 note. 

Lovejoy, Elijah, martyr, 487. 

Lowell, James Russell, on Pilgrims, 47 ; 
on Quaker persecutions, 112; on 
Puritan gloom, 149 ; on Puritan schools, 
154-5 ; inscription over British dead 
at Concord, 207 ; on territorial growth, 
338-9 ; on solidarity of labor, 425 ; 
place in literature, 444 ; and slavery, 
485 ; on Fugitive Slave Law, 501 ; 
on Dred Scott Case, 511 ; early atti- 
tude toward secession, 529 ; after 
Sumter, 531-2; on Grant, 569; 
on corruption in politics, 589. 



Lowell factory life, in 1830, 431. 

Lower South, the, 399-400. 

Loyalists, in American Revolution, 211, 

224, 231-3, 234, 235. 
Lundy, Benjamin, 484. 
Lundy's Lane, 384. 
Lusitania, The. 710-1. 
Lyon, Matthew, 339. 

McAdoo, and the Coal Trust, 752 ; and 
the San Francisco Convention, 756. 

McCuUoch vs. Maryland, 415-6. 

McCormick reaper, 450, 517, 518. 

McKinley, William, 596, 607-9, 612, 613, 
619, 620. 

Maclay, William, Journal, 302 ; note, 
303, 304. 

Madison, James, and call for Con- 
vention, 273 ; and Journal, 274 ; and 
Virginia Plan, 280 ; opposes Conn. 
Compromise, 283 ; and the franchise, 
293 ; and the Federalist, 595 ; on " We 
the People ", 298-9 ; characterized 
by Maclay, 302, note ; and Virginia 
Resolutions (1798), 329-30; Presi- 
dent, 382-3; reelection, 383; and 
War of 1812, 383 ff. ; veto of internal 
improvements, 397-8 ; opposes man- 
hood franchise, 453. 

Madison's Journal of the Federal Con- 
vention, 274. 

Maine, 98; joined to Mass., 115; and 
NE boundary and Jay Treaty, 325; 
State of, 402, 419; 1st prohibition 
law, 449 ; and Webster-Ashburton 
Treaty, 477. 

Maine, The, and Spanish-American War, 
613. 

Maize, 6-7, 56. 

Manila, battle of, 614. 

Mann, Horace, 434, 443. 

Manufactures, colonial, 72, 1.59, 160, 
161; in ISOO, .344-5; growth of tex- 
tile in New England (1807-1815), 411 ; 
and early demand for protection (see 
Tariffs) ; in 1830, 421 ; in New South, 
582 ; after high tariffs of '88 and '92, 
601-2. 

Marblehead, 67. 

Marbury vs. Madison, 362-3. 

Marietta, 257. 

Marne, battle of, 703. 

Marshall, John, on " general welfare " 
clause, 286 ; on Federal courts and 
the States, 307; chief justice, 362- 
3 ; Marbury vs. Madison, 362-3 ; 



26 



INDEX 



McCulloch vs. Maryland, and Cohens 
vs. Virginia, 415. 

Marston's Eastward Hoe, 20-21. 

Martin, Luther, and " Federalist, " 294 
and note. 

Maryland, colonial, 41-46; and " Terri- 
tories, " 250-1 ; manhood franchise, 
453. 

Mason, George, and Virginia's bill of 
rights, 214 ; and Federal Convention, 
275 ff. ; lonely champion of democ- 
racy, 279 ; declines to sign, 281-2 ; 
and opposes ratification, 282, 295 ; 
and Conn. Compromise, 283 ; criti- 
cises "necessary and proper," 286; 
advocates fair treatment of West, 
287 ; opposes slave trade, 287-8 ; ad- 
vocates democratic franchise, 293. 

Mason and Dixon's Line, 129. 

Mason and Slidell, 551. 

Massachusetts, colonial, preliminaries, 
62, 63, 65; the "great migration," 
65-7 ; significance in history, 67 ; 
motives, 67-9 ; early hardships, 69- 
70; early industries, 71-3; danger 
of interference from England, 73-4 ; 
aristocracy and democracy, 74 ff. ; 
Watertown Protest, 77 ; represent- 
ative government, 78-80 ; social 
classes, 81 ; franchise, 82 ; evolution 
of ballot, 82-4 ; growth of jury system, 
84-5 ; written laws, 85-6 ; evolution 
of bicameral legislature, 86-8, 97 ; 
and free speech, 87 ; town-meeting 
government, 88-90; ideal, aristocratic 
theocracy, 90-1 ; tendencies to 
church independency, 90-91 ; church 
and state, 91 ; denial of religious 
freedom, 92, 97 ; and New England 
Confederation, 104-106 ; under the 
second Stuarts, 107 ff. ; and Navi- 
gation Acts, 110; struggle to save 
self-government, 112-117; charter 
of 1691, 118; and governor's salary, 
142; witchcraft delusion, 149-150; 
calls Stamp-Act Congress, 188; orig- 
inates town committees of corre- 
spondence, 197 ; and the Revolution, 
200-1 ; bill of rights and slavery, 
215 note; initiative and referendum 
(and Constitutional convention) in, 
218-9, 220-221 ; executive veto, 221 ; 
state and church under state con- 
stitution, 221 ; aristocracy intrenched 
in senate, 222-3 ; territorial claims 
and cessions, 250, 252 ; Shays' Re- 



bellion, 266, 267; nullification and 
secession projects, 387-392 ; and 
educational revival after 1830 ; 443 ; 
extension of franchise after 1821, 453; 
abolition and slavery, 479. 

Maury, Matthew Fontaine, 444. 

May, Samuel J., 485. 505. 

Mayflower, the, 52-53. 

Mayflower Compact, the, 53-4. 

Mechanics' Free Press, 435-6; quoted 
passim. 

Mecklenburg " Declaration," 207. 

Memphis, battle of, 537. 

Mennonites, in early Pennsylvania, 130; 
and slavery, ib. 

Merrimac, The, 535-6. 

Methodist church, growth of, 446. 

Mexican War, 493-4. 

Mexico, independent, 490; and Texas, 
which see; and war with U. S., 
493-4 ; and Gadsden Purchase, 494 ; 
Woodrow Wilson and, 682-3. 

Michigan, 422. 

Michigan University, 589. 

" Midnight Judges, " 333. 

Militarism, in Europe, leading to World 
War, 689, 695. 

Mills, Roger Q., 595. 

Minnesota, 513. 

Minimum wage, 653. 

Missouri, see Missouri Compromise; 
saved to Union in 1861, 533. 

Missouri Compromise, 417-8 ; a sec- 
tional measure, 482 ; and Kansas- 
Nebraska Bill, 506-8; and Dred 
Scott, 511. 

Mississippi, Territory, 248 ; State, 402. 

Mississippi River, na^dgation of, in early 
national period, 246 ; and Civil War, 
536-7. 

Mitchell, John, and coal strike, 649-50. 

Monitor and Merrimac, 535. 

Monmouth, battle of, 230. 

Monroe, James, opposes Federal Con- 
vention, 274 ; vetoes internal improve- 
ments, 399 ; and Monroe Doctrine, 
which see. 

Monroe Doctrine, 407-10; and Napo- 
leon III in Mexico, 552, 565 ; and 
Venezuelan arbitration, 611-2; and 
Roosevelt's Venezuelan arbitration, 
622. 

Montana, 581. 

Moore, Ely, 437. 

Morgan, J. Pierpont, 650. 

Mormons, the, 448-9. 



INDEX 



27 



Morrill Bill (agricultural education), 545. 
Moms, Gouverneur, 144, 277, 281, 283, 

286, 293, 335-6, 399. 
Mugwumps, 594. 
Municipal corruption, before 1860, 520 ; 

and public-service corporations, 642-4. 
Munn vs. Illinois (the Granger Case), 

631. 

Napoleon I, see Louisiana Purchase, and 
War of 1812. 

Napoleon III, and American Civil War, 
552 ; and Monroe Doctrine, 565. 

" Nat Turner's Rising, " 486. 

National Bank, 312 ; and implied powers, 
312; the second Bank, 398; and 
Bonus Bill veto, 398 ; and Jackson, 
464-5, 468-70. 

National Banking Acts, of 1863 and 1864, 
544. 

National debt, as fixed by Hamilton's 
Plan, 309-310 ; and Jefferson, 358-9 ; 
in 1815, 384 ; paid in 1835, 471 ; in 
1865, 553 ; reduction by 1890, 555 ; 
and World War, 748. 

National Road, 365-6, 396-7. 

Navigation Acts, English, and European 
mercantilism, 108 ff. ; England's policy 
relatively enlightened, 108 ff. ; Spain's, 
108-9 ; Act of 1660, 110 ; of 1663, 111 ; 
restricting manufactures after 1690, 
188-9 ; Sugar Act of 1733, 139. 

Nebraska, 580. 

Negro, the, in Reconstruction, 556 ff. ; 
franchise refused long in Northern 
States, 559 and note ; Constitutional 
amendments and, 560-1 ; and Sotith- 
ern agriculture, 582. 

Nevada, 580. 

New England Council (or Plymouth 
Council), 47-48. 60. 62, 73. 

New England Confederation, 104-6. 

New England Primer, 154, 155. 

New Hampshire, 98, 115, 139, 217-8, 
220, 222, 283, 300, 479. 

New Harmony, 448. 

New Haven, 98, 114. 

New Jersey, 107, 117, 140, 275, 479, 480. 
6.39. 

New Mexico. 493-4, 582. 

New Orleans. 372. 373, 537. 

New Orleans, battle of, 385. 

New South, the, 582. 

New York, 107, 117; as New Nether- 
lands, 127 ; petition of English settlers 
for self-government, 127, 128 ; and 



English rule, 1 28 ; royal province, 
139; and Revolution, 206, 207, 216, 
218, 220, 221, 261 ; loses vote in 1788, 
301 ; and extension of franchise, 453 ; 
and "spoils," 459 note; gradual 
emancipation in, 479 ; Australian 
ballot, 665 ; expulsion of Socialists 
from Assembly, 661. 

New York City, growth due to Erie 
Canal, 401. 

Newburg Address, Washington's, 232. 

Newspapers, colonial, 153 ; first penny 
daily, 444. 

Newtown, 65, 101, 102. 

Nippold, Ottfried, 698. 

Nomination, Presidential, by congres- 
sional caucus, 318-9 ; by State 
legislatures, 363, 418 ; decline of 
caucus, 419, 459 ; and party con- 
ventions, 459-60 ; direct primaries, 
665-6, 677. 

" Non-Partisan League, " in North 
Dakota, 658-60. 

Normal School, the first in America, 
443. 

" North, " the, in 1830, 421 ; in 1860, 
520-1. 

North, Lord, and the American Revolu- 
tion, 193 ff. ; especially, 199, 200, 225, 
233. 

North Carolina, see Carolinas ; and the 
Western counties (Regulators), 184-5; 
and Mecklenburg " Declaration, " 
207 ; and Revolutionary State fran- 
chise, 222 ; and early Tennessee 
settlement, 238, 241, 245, 246; cedes 
Tennessee, 251 ; and Federal Con- 
stitution, 296, 314. See Civil War. 

North Dakota, 581. See Dakotas and 
Non-Partisan League. 

Northern Securities Case, 634. 

Northwest Ordinance, the, 253-255; 
evasion of anti-slavery provisions, 
480-481. 

Northwest Posts, and Revolutionary 
War, 2.34. 235 ; and Jay Treaty, 258 ; 
and Indian troubles, 258, note. 

" No taxation without representation, " 
first affirmed in America in Virginia, 
.38, 40. 

Nullification, by colonial Massachusetts 
in New England Confederation, 105-6 ; 
by Georgia (Chisholm case), 307 ; and 
Kentucky Resolutions, 329-30: dis- 
cussion of, 330 ; in New England 
(1804-1815), 386-92; and Calhoun's 



INDEX 



Exposition, etc., 465-469 ; and Georgia 
in 1832, 468-469. See Personal Lib- 
erty laws. 

Oberlin, admission of women, 444. 

Ohio, see Northivest Ordinance and Ohio 
Company; State, 258, 314; and 
internal improvements, 365 ; growth, 
367. 

Ohio Company, 253, 257-8. 

Oklahoma, 581-2, 664. 

Omnibus Bill, of 1850, 500-2. 

Oregon, U. S. claims to, 378, 406 ; and 
European claims, 406; "joint occu- 
pation, " 406-7 ; and Monroe Doc- 
trine, 407-S ; northern boundary 
defined, 409, 491 ; and Texas question, 
491; in campaign of 1844, 491-2; 
compromise with England regarding, 
492-3 ; Statehood, 513 ; progressive 
politics in, 653, 664, 667, 668, 669. 

Ostend Manifesto, 494. 

Otis, James, 170-1, 179, 181, 188. 

Owen, Robert, 448. 

Paine, Thomas, 212; and Common 
Sense, 212; and the Crisis, 217; and 
plan for " territories," 250-1 ; and a 
continental union, 260. 

Pan-American Congress of 1889, 610. 

Panama Canal, 519, 622-623. 

" Panics " industrial, 413, 469-70, 
470-1, 517, 600-7, 627-8, 674. 

Parker, Alton B., 672, 677-8. 

Parker, Theodore, 485. 

Party government, not foreseen by the 
"Fathers," 316, 319-20; nature of, 
319-20. 

Payne-Aldrich Tariff, 675-6. 

Peace Congress of 1919, 731-43. 

Penn, William, 128, 130, 168. 

Pennsylvania, 107, 128-31, 173, 185, 
222, 366, 401-2, 479. 

Pensions, Civil War, 598-9. 

Perry's victory on Lake Erie, 384-5. 

Pershing, John J., 721. 

Personal Liberty laws, 504-5. 

Petersburg, siege of, 540. 

Petition, right of, and Puritan Massa- 
chusetts, 76-77, 95, 96 ; and the Slave 
Power, 488-9. See Free Speech. 

Philippines, and Spanish War, 614-5 ; 
acquired, 615-0; and " imperialism, " 
618-9 ; growth of self-government in, 
619 ; tariffs, 618, note, 619. 

Phillips, Wendell, 484, 529. 



Pickering, Thomas, 386, 390. 

Pierce, Franklin, 505, 506-8. 

Pierce, William, notes on Federal 
Convention, 275-6, 278. 

Pilgrim Fathers, see Separatists; in 
Holland, 49-50 ; removal to America, 
50-53 ; see Plymouth. 

Pike's Expedition (Zebulon Pike), 405. 

Pinchot, Gifford, 675. 

Pinckney Treaty, with Spain, 327. 

Pine Tree Shillings, 113. 

Pitt, William (Lord Chatham), 169, 170, 
181, 183, 192. 

Pitt, William (the younger), 183, 380. 

Pittsburg, and iron industry, 450 and 
note. 

Pittsburg Landing, battle of, 537. 

Plymouth, see Pilgrims ; early history, 
53-60; annexed to Mass., 60, 115; 
place in history, 61. 

Plymouth Company, of 1606, 23, 24. 
See Neiv England Council. 

Poe, Edgar Allan, 444. 

Political parties, see Party Government. 

Polk, James K., 492, 493, 494. 

" Pony Express," the, 519. 

Pontiac's War, 173. 

Population, in 1660, 107 ; in 1690, 133 ff. ; 
in 1775, 156; in 1800, 342-344; in 
1810,367; in 1850, 496 ; in 1860,520; 
in 1880-1920, 578-9. 

Populist party, 606. 

Port Hudson, Capture, 537. 

Porto Rico, 612, 615. 

Potash, industry, 73, 401. 

Presidential elections, see Elections. 

Presidential patronage, 460-1. 

Preston, Levi, 176. 

Primaries, see Direct. 

Princeton University, 152. 

Profiteering, orgy of, after World War, 
752-4. 

Progressive movement, in politics, the, 
663 ff . ; and the States, 663-4 ; 
Australian ballot, 665 ; direct pri- 
maries, 665-6 ; direct legislation and 
recall, 666-8 ; direct election of 
Senate, 669 ; woman suffrage, 669- 
71 ; and prohibition, 671-2 ; and 
Roosevelt, 672-4; and Taft, 675-7; 
and Wilson, 677-81 ; defeat in 1920, 
7.57. 

Progressive party, the, 678. 

Prohibitionist party, 592, 671-2. 

Protective tariffs, see Tariffs. 

Public Domain, acquired by State 



INDEX 



cessions, 249-51 (for extension, see 
Territorial growth) ; Survey Ordinance 
(and school grants) , 255-66 ; credit 
sales, 367 ; new system of 1820, 395 ; 
demand of West and of labor for 
freer policy, 462 (and see Labor) ; 
Foote's Resolution, 466-73 ; and Pre- 
emption law, 472-4 ; and " Settlers' 
Associations," 474-5; grants to 
States, 473-4 ; Homestead legislation, 
514; railway grants, 569-71, 628, 
note ; looting of, 588-9 ; and Ballinger 
incident, 675. 

Public Service corporations, 641 ; and 
political corruption, 642-4. 

Pure Food law, 673. 

Puritanism, 49 ; factor in colonization, 
50 ff. ; decay after 1690, 147-9; 
and witchcraft delusion, 149-50 ; 
and rise of other religious movements, 
150, 151. 

Putnam, Israel, 201. 

Quakers, 100, 112. See Pennsylvania. 
Quay, Matthew, 596-7, 599, note. 
Quebec Act. 201, 237, 243. 
Quincy, Josiah, 388-9. 

Railway, the, 451-2; growth to 1860, 
516; and land grants, 569-71, 628, 
note; see Union Pacific; extension 
from 1865 to 1870, 582 ; to 1910, 583 ; 
transformation of old roads, 583-4 ; 
consolidation, 584-585 ; watered 
stock, 627-9 ; further consolidation, 
629-630; rates, 629, note; dis- 
criminations, 630 ; Granger legis- 
lation, 630-631 ; Interstate Com- 
merce Act, 631-2; Hepburn Act, 
632-4 ; failure of attempts to regulate, 
634-5 ; and the war, 635. See 
Cummins-Esch Act. 

Raleigh, Sir Walter, 14, 16-7. 

Ramsey, David, quoted, 186. 

Randolph, Edmund, 215, note, 275, 
180, 282, 287, 283, 305, 316. 

Randolph, John, 412, 414, 419, 453. 

Recall, the, 667-8. 

Reconstruction (after Civil War), 555- 
566. 

Reed, Walter, and the Yellow Fever, 617. 

Reeder, Andrew H., 509. 

Referendum, originates in demands for 
popular ratification of State con- 
stitutions in New England in 1776, 
218-220; development, 666-7. 



" Regulators, " the, in North Carolina, 
184-5. 

Religious freedom, and Md., 45-6; 
and the Puritans, 91 ff. ; ideal stated 
by Lords Brooke and Saltonstall, 
96-7 ; and Rh. I., 98-101 ; and 
Revolutionary State Constitutions, 
221 ; in early " West, " 241 ; and 
Northwest Ordinance, 255. See Vir- 
ginia Bill of Rights, First Amendment 
to Federal Constitution, and Free 
Speech. 

Republican party (of Jefferson), or- 
ganized, 317-8 ; and French Revo- 
lution, 321 ; and victory in 1800, 
331 ff. ; divides into National Repub- 
licans (Whigs) and Democrats, which 
see. 

Republican party, coalescence of anti- 
Nebraska men, 509 ; first Convention, 
509-10; and Dred Scott decision, 
511-2. See Elections. 

Revere, Paul, 195, 350. 

Rhode Island, 98 ; early history and 
religious freedom, 98-101 ; charter 
of 1663, 100, 113-4; under Andros, 
116-7; recovers charter, 117; dis- 
franchises Catholics, 131 ; and Federal 
Constitution, 283, 296, 314; and 
Dorr's Rebellion, 477-8 ; gradual 
emancipation, 479. 

Rice culture, 159, 355. 

" Right of Search," 322-3. 480. 

Robertson, James, 239, 244-5, 247. 

Robinson, John, 55, 59. 

Rockefeller, John D.. 636-7. i 

Rolfe, John, and tobacco culture, 34. 

Roosevelt, Theodore, quoted, 236, 243- 
4 ; and campaign of 1884, 594 ; Civil 
Service commissioner, 597 ; in Spanish 
War, 613, 615; Vice President, 619; 
President, 620 ; and Germany in 
Venezuela, 621 and note ; new Monroe 
Doctrine, 622 ; and Panama Canal, 
622-4 ; and arbitration treaties, 624 ; 
and coal strike of 1902, 649-50; 
and the courts, 652-3 ; story to the 
presidency, 672 ; reelection in 1904, 
672; and progressive movement, 
672-4; and the Trusts, 673-4; and 
Taft, 674, 677 ; see Elections of 1912, 
and 1916. 

Rough Riders, Roosevelt's, 613. 

Rumsey, James, and the steamboat, 
369. 

Rural credit law, 682. 



so 



INDEX 



Russia, Revolution in, 717, 719 ; and 

the Bolshevists, 743-7. 
Russell, Charles Edward, 662, 716. 
Russell, Lord John, 551-2. 

Saar valley, and the German Treaty, 

739. 
St. Louis, 423. 
Salem, 62, 63, 65, 93, 150. 
Saltonstall, Sir Richard, and religious 

freedom, 97. 
San Domingo, 622. 
San Jacinto, battle of, 490. 
San Juan Hill, 613. 
Sandys, Sir Edwin, 30-2, and note, 33, 

34-6, 51. 
Santa Anna, 490. 
Santiago, battle of, 614. 
Schurz, Carl, 496, note, 594. 
Scotch-Irish, 133-136. 
Scott, Winfield, 493, 505, 528. 
Seminoles, 5 ; and Seminole War, 469 

and note. 
Separatists, in religion, Left wing of 

Puritanism, 49 ; Scrooby Separatists, 

see Pilgrim Fathers. 
Servants (Indentured, etc.), 19; in early 

Mass., 65 and note, 67, 68 ; in colonial 

life, 157-8, 186. 
Sevier, John, 2.39, 241. 
Seward, WUliam H., 502, 503, 511, 

523. 
Shantung, and the award to Japan, 737, 

741. 
Shays' Rebellion, 267-8. 
Shelbourne (Lord), 183, 233. 
Sheridan, " Phil, " 540. 
Sherman, John, 638 and note, 640-1. 
Sherman, Roger, 277, 282, 283. 
Sherman, W. T., 537, 539, 540. 
Sherman Act (silver), 606. 
Sherman Anti-Trust Act, 638. See 

Clayton Art. 
Shiloh, battle of, 537. 
Sigel, Franz, 496. 
Silver, 605 ; see Free Silver. 
Simms, William Gilmore, 444. 
Sinclair, Upton, 662, 716. 
" Single Tax, " the, 662-3. 
Slaughter House Cases, 564. 
Slavery (Negro'), colonial, 156-7, 158, 

159;! Jefferson's attempts to exclude 

from Territories, 252 ; exclusion from 

Northwest, 255 ; and the Federal 

Convention, 287-8 ; and Washington's 

administration, 312; Fugitive Slave 



law of 1793, 313-4; in 1830, 422; 
review to 1844, 476 ff. ; and Missouri 
Compromise, 482 ; Slave Power ag- 
gressive after 1830, 482 ff. ; and the 
Abolitionists, 494-6; attacks free 
speech, 486-8 ; and political aboli- 
tionists, 488-9; and Texas, 490-2: 
and Mexican War, 493-4 ; and de- 
mand for Cuba, 494-5 ; struggle to 
control territory acquired from 
Mexico, 496 ff. ; squatter sovereignty 
doctrine, 497 ; and Compromise of 
1850, 499-502; Fugitive Slave law, 
501-2, 503-5 ; and election of 1852, 
505 ; and Kansas-Nebraska Bill, 
506-8; and Homestead Bill, 514; 
and John Brown, 515 ; Uncle Tom's 
Cabin, 515 ; and industrial retard- 
ation, 520-2 ; and the White race, 
521-2; and the Civil War, 529, 540 
and note, 546-9 ; Thirteenth amend- 
ment, 549. See Negroes. 

Smith, Adam, 138, 181. 

Smith, Captain John, 27-28. 

Smith, Sydney, 424. 

Smith-Lever Agricultural Education Act, 
680, 682. 

Smithsonian Institution, 444. 

Smuts, Jan, and the German Treaty, 
742. 

Socialism, 660-663. 

Sons of Liberty, 191. 

"South," the, 163-4; in 1830, 421; 
in 1860, 520-522 ; see Civil War. 

South Carolina, see Carolinas; and 
election of presidential electors by 
legislature, 455 ; and nullification, 
465-9 ; secession, 526. 

South Dakota, 581. 

Southampton (Earl), and London Com- 
pany, 35-6. 

Spain, in America, 6, 7-9 ; and Armada, 
9 ; and Virginia, 14, 27 ; colonial 
navigation acts, 108-9 ; and American 
Revolution, 229 and note ; and 
navigation of Mississippi, 246 ; and 
settlement of West, 247 ; and Pinck- 
ney treaty, 327 ; and Louisiana 
Purchase, 371 and note ; and the 
Floridas, 374-7 ; Spanish American 
Republics after 1808, 375 fJ. ; Spanish- 
American War, 612-6. 

Sparks, Jared, 444. 

Squatter sovereignty, 497, 498, 501. 

Stamp Act of 1775, 174-5, 188-92. 

Stamp Act Congress, 189-90. 



INDEX 



31 



Standard Oil Company, 636 ; and the 

" trust, " 637-S. 
Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 669. 
Star-route scandal, 593. 
Star-spangled Banner, the, 385-6. 
State Universities, 256-7. 
Steamboat, the, 368-9, 39-6. 
Stephens, Alexander H., 527. 
Stevens, Thaddeus, 559-60. 
Stoughton, Israel, and free speech, 87. 
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 515. 
Strikes, before 1840, 434-5; 439-40; 

of 1877, 648 ; Pullman strike of '94, 

648; coal strike of 1902, 649-50; 

and the public, 651 ; and violence, 

651-2. See Labor. 
Stuart, Gilbert, 349. 
Stuart, " Jeb," 540. 
Submarine warfare (German), 709-11. 
Sugar Act, of 1733, 139 ; of 1764, 174. 
Sumner, Charles, 505, 559-560. 
Sumter, Fort, 531. 

Supreme Court, see Federal Judiciary. 
Survey Ordinance of 1785, see Public 

Domain. 

Taft, William Howard, and the Arizona 
recall, 668 ; presidency of, 674-7 ; 
and the Payne-Aldrich tariff, 675-6 ; 
and the Insurgents, 676-7 ; and elec- 
tion of 1912, 677, 679 ; and War Labor 
Board, 750. 

Talleyrand, 371, 382. 

Tammany, 597, 643. 

Taney, Roger B., 510. 

Tariffs, in 1789, 308; of 1791, 311; 
question of protection after War of 
1812, 411-2; tariff of 1816, 412; 
of 1824, 414; of 1828, 414-5; and 
nullification sentiment, 465, 469 ; of 
1832, 467 ; compromise of 1833, 468 ; 
and Tyler's veto, 476 ; tariff of 1842, 
476 ; and Greeley's doctrine of pro- 
tection to labor, 476 ; legislation to 
the Civil War, 476-7 ; " war tariffs," 
543 ; and Cleveland, 595 ; failure of 
Mills' Bill, 595 ; and campaign of 1892, 
599; Wilson tariff, 599; McKinley 
tariff, .597-8; Dingley tariff, 600-1; 
and the Trusts, 601 ; Payne-Aldrich, 
675-6 ; Underwood, 679. 

Taylor, Zachary, 493, 499. 

Tecumthe, 394-5. 

Temperance movement,- the early, 449. 

Tennessee, 233, 314. See Watauga, and 
Frankland. 



Territorial growth, 1660-1690, 107 ; new 
frontiers to Revolution, 133-5 ; in 
1783, 233-4; Louisiana Purchase, 
370 ff.; the Floridas, 137, 374-7; 
Texas, 377-8; 490-2; and Mexican 
War, 493-4 ; Gadsden Purchase, 494 ; 
Oregon, which see ; meaning of growth 
in American history, see* West and 
Frontier: maps, after 106, 232, 236, 
239, 250, 258, 340, 342, 343, 372, 376, 
379. 

" Territory," as a political division, 
250-1 ; see Northwest Ordinance. 

Texas, and Louisiana Purchase and 
West Florida, 377-8 ; independence, 
490 ; annexation, 490-2 ; and Mexican 
War, 493, 494 ; and secession, 527 
note. 

Thames, battle of, 384, 395. 

Thomas, George H., 537, 539. 

Tilden, Samuel J., 571-2, 643. 

Tippecanoe, .395. 

" Tippecanoe and Tyler Too," 475. 

Tobacco industry, 7, 34 ; and King 
James, 34-5 ; and medium of exchange, 
124. 

Tocqueville, Alexis de, quoted, 12, 271. 

Toombs, Robert, and disunion, 499, 526. 

Tory, see Loyalist. 

Toussaint, L'Ouverture, 371. 

Townley, Arthur C, 659. 

Townshend, Charles, 192-3. 

Treaty of 1783, 233-5. 

Trenton, battle of, 217. 

Trevett vs. Weeden, 266-7. 

Triple Alliance, the, and World War, 
687-8. 

Triple Entente, 688-9. 

Trotsky, Leon, 718, 743-7. 

" Trust," thef industrial, and the tariff, 
601 ; discussed, 637 IT. ; and Sherman 
Act, 638; rapid growth after 1899, 
638-9; State regulation fails, 639; 
and 14th amendment, 640 ; see Clay- 
ton Act. 

Turner, Frederick J., quoted on the 
West, 259, 399-400. 

Tweed Ring, 643. 

Tyler, John, 475-7, 491-2. 

Tyler, Moses Coit, quoted, 175, 199. 

Uncle Tom's Cabin, 515. 

" Underground Railroad," 505. 

Union Pacific, 545 ; and Credit Mobilier, 

569-571. 
Union party, the, of 1860, 523-5. 



32 



INDEX 



Unitarianism, 445-6. 

" United States," meaning in territorial 
sense (territory of, or territory be- 
longing to), 373-4. 

Unlversalist church, 446. 

Uren, William, 664, 667. 

Utah, 581. 

Valley Forge, 225, 228. 

Van Buren, Martin, 472, 491-2, 498. 

Vane, Sir Harry, 95. 

Venezuela, 611-2, 621 and note. 

Vergennes, 169, 234, 235. 

Vermont, 166, 223 ; and democracy, 
223, 314 ; first State to abolish slavery 
directly, 479. 

Veto, executive, see Jackson, and Cleve- 
land ; origin of American form in Rev- 
olutionary State constitutions, 221 ; 
" pocket veto," 458. 

Vicksburg, siege of, 537. 

Vincennes, 233, 236. 

Virginia, attempts to colonize, 14 ff. 
motives, 12-21 ; difficulties, 15-16 
charter, 17-18; lure of riches, 20-21 
under London Company, 22 fT. ; no 
self government to 1619, 23-30 ; early 
history, see Jamestown ; plantation 
system, 24-6 ; industry in common, 
26 ; and John Smith, 27-8 ; and Dela- 
ware, 28; charters of 1609 and 1612, 
28-9; rule of Dale, 29-30; and 
liberalized London Company of 1618, 
30 ff. ; first Representative Assemblj^, 
31-2; Charter of 1618 from Com- 
pany, 33 ; and tobacco, 34 ; royal 
province, 37 ff. ; Assembly saved, 
38-9 ; taxation and representation, 
38, 40; "mutiny of 1635," 40; en- 
larged self-government under Com- 
monwealth, 40-1 ; and the Restora- 
tion, 41, 119 ff. ; the Cavaliers, 119 
ff. ; reaction in politics, 120-1 ; and 
navigation acts, 121 ; Bacon's Re- 
bellion, 121-3 ; aristocratic local 
government, 121, 125; contrasted 
with New England, 126-7; and 
American Revolution, 188-9, 190-1, 
193-4, 202-4, and passim; evolu- 
tion from colony to commonwealth, 
202-4, 210-5; Bill of Rights, 214-5; 
conquest of Northwest, 238 ff. ; claims 
and cessions of Northwest, 251 ; 
Military Reserve, 251-2 ; and Fed- 
eral Convention, 275 ; and Jefferson's 
reforms during Revolution, 354 ; 



franchise, 453 ; and secession, 532-3 

and note. 
Virginia Bill of Rights, 214-5. 
Virginia Resolutions of 1798, 329. 

Virginia, The, 535-6. 
Virginia, University of, 355. 

Wade, " Ben," and Reconstruction, 558. 

Walker, Francis A., quoted, 264, 351-2. 

War of 1812, 381-5 ; and New England 
treason, 386-91 ; results, 393 ff. 

Ward, Nathaniel, 86. 

Washington, George, and Pontiac's War, 
173 ; and English debts, 190, note ; 
and Revolution, 203-4, 209, 211, 217, 
225, 226, 228, 232 ; the one indispen- 
sable man, 226 ; Newburgh Address, 
232; on the anarchy of the "Critical 
Period," 266; and danger of losing 
the West, 272 and note ; and Federal 
Convention, 273, 274, 275; presi- 
dency, 300 ff. ; and Congress, 301 ; 
and titles, 301-2; and Senate, 304; 
and Cabinet, 304-5 ; pardons leaders 
of Whisky Rebellion, 311 ; and implied 
powers, 312; reelection, 318; refuses 
third term, 318 (no constitutional 
significance, 363) ; and neutrality 
proclamation, 321 ; and Jay Treaty, 
322-5 ; refuses candidacy in 1800, 331 ; 
on disappearance of free land, 351. 

Washington, Capital, 310. 

Washington, State of, 581. 

Watauga, 238-241 ; Articles of Asso- 
ciation, 241 ; and Cumberland settle- 
ments, 244; and " Frankland," 245. 

Watertown, 65 ; and taxation without 
representation, 77, 97 ; and establish- 
ment of town government, 88 j and 
migration to Conn., 101-2. 

" Watered stock," see Railroads. 

Wayne, Anthony, 258. 

" We the People," 297-299. 

Weaver, James B., 606. 

Webster, Daniel, and " We the People," 
299 ; and tariff, 414-5 ; and franchise, 
453; leader in 1830, 463-4; and 
Jackson, 465 ; debate with Hayne, 
466-7 (and 299) ; Ashburton treaty, 
477 ; and Compromise of 1850, 501-2. 

Webster, Noah, 444. 

Webster-Ashburton Treaty, 477. 

West, the, in 1690-1760, 133-6; 
Contrast with East, 165-7; griev- 
ances, 184-5 ; and the Revolution, 
185; "Second" West, acquired in 



%i 



yn 



INDEX 



33 



Revolution. 237 ff. ; Watauga, 238- 
41 ; early Kentucky and Tennessee, 
40-8 ; separatist tendencies and 
causes, 246-7 ; State claims and 
cessions, 250-2 ; plan for " Terri- 
tories," 250-1 ; meaning of frontier 
in American history, 259 and esp. 
337 ff. ; growth from 1800 to 1810, 
366-8; the "Third" West after 
1815, 393 ff. ; extinction of Indian 
titles, 393-4 ; and ruin of the East, 
394 ; roads new and old, 398-400 ; and 
internal improvements, 398 ff. ; and 
canals, 401-2 ; unparalleled growth 
from 1815 to 1830, 402-4; character 
in 1830, 422 ff. ; democracy and 
optimism, 424-5. 

West, Benjamin, 349. 

West Florida, 374 and map ; annexation 
of part, S75, 377. 

West Virginia, 532 and note. 

Western Reserve (Connecticut's), 251-2. 

Weymouth, Captain George, 2, 3. 

Wheelwright, John, 95-6. 

Whigs, English, in American Revolution, 
183-4, 233. 

Whig party (in America), 465, 475, 498, 
523. 

Whisky Rebellion, 311-2. 

White, Andrew D., 505, note, 544-5, 
589, 594. 

White Plains, battle of, 217. 

Whitfield, George. 151. 

Whitney, Eli, 345. 

Whittier, John G., 444. 485 ; on Webster, 
501. 

Wiggles worth's Dan of Doom, 148-9. 

Wilderness, battle of, 540. 

Wilderness Road, 244, 399. 

William and Mary, 152. 

Williams, Roger, 92-4; and religious 
freedom, 98-101. 

Wilmot Proviso, 497. 

Wilson, James, 274. 

Wilson, Woodrow, quoted on aristo- 
cratic purpose of Federal Convention, 
276 ; restores personal address to 
Congress, 358; quoted on South's 
devotion to the Lost Cause, 546 
on Reconstruction blunders, 562 
and Philippine self-government, 619 
fight against Trusts in New Jersey 
639, 665; campaign of 1912, 678-9 
first administration progressive gains 



679-81; and Mexico, 682-3; and 
World War, which see ; reelection, 
711-2; proposes league of nations to 
enforce peace, 713-4; war message, 
715-6; fourteen points, 72.3-4; at 
Versailles Peace Congress, which see, 
and esp. 743 ; campaign for League 
of Nations, and physical collapse, 756- 
7 ; reversal of domestic policies, 
755 ff. 

Winslow, Edward, 51, 56-7, 60. 

Winthrop, John, 64, 65, 66, 68-9, 76, 
77-80, 94. 

Wisconsin, 496 ; and personal liberty 
laws, 505 and note. 

Witchcraft delusion, 149-50. 

Wolfe, James, 137, 172. 

Woman movement, the, and Body of 
Liberties, 86 ; admitted to Oberlin, 
444 ; first advance, 449 ; and labor 
movement (shorter day and mini- 
mum wage), 652-3 ; enfranchised, 669- 
71. 

Wood, Leonard, 616. 

Workman's Compensation Acts, 655, 
681. 

World War, the, causes, 684 ff. ; Euro- 
pean alliances, 687-9 ; and the Balkan 
seed plot, 689-95 ; and Germany, 
695-701 ; and America, 703 ff. ; prog- 
ress of, 703-9 ; trench warfare, 704, 
705-6 ; and sea power, and U-boats, 
704, 709-711, 720; American neu- 
trality, 707 ff. ; Germany makes 
neutrality impossible, 709-11; Amer- 
ica enters, 714^6; campaigns of 
1916-7, 717-22; Russian collapse, 
717 ; American participation, 720-1 ; 
progress in 1918, 725-30; see 
Peace Congress; cost, 731 ff. ; and 
748 ; and American organization, 
748-751. 

Writs of Assistance, 169-71. 

Wyatt, Sir Francis, 40. 

Wyoming, 581 ; and woman suffrage, 
670. 

" X. Y. Z.," 326. 

Yale University, 152, 505 note. 
Yeardley, Sir George, 31, 39. 
Yellow Fever, and Walter Reed, 617. 
Yorktown, capture of, 232. 

Zenger, John, and free speech, 143-4. 



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